I quite literally lost my home a few months ago. It’s gone, apparently never to come back. And by “home,” I mean my version of Earth and the entire universe it inhabited. And as awful as that is, as empty and furious and lost as that makes me, I have watched something happen here that may be far worse.
For awhile, I was stranded in your universe, your Earth. Now I’m here voluntarily, tracking down a lead. And as you might have guessed, it hasn’t been pleasant. “The Safe Zone,” as it’s so absurdly labeled, has been like stepping through a funhouse mirror sans fun. Plagues, inequity, homelessness, and corruption shade every minute of life here. And after a recent ruling that will somehow strip the power from anyone with a uterus to decide how that uterus is used, a lot of people are waking up to the startling realization that their home might not only be lost…but was never what they thought it was in the first place.
My Earth was not perfect. We still fight and there are still charlatans and people still get sick and die. As a newspaper columnist, I regularly commented on the problems of the world, and became just a tad cynical as a result. But in our history, our second President was Abigail Adams. The widespread enslavement of the people of the African continent never happened. “Transgendered” isn’t even a term in my world. We’re all taught that who we are born as is not who we’re expected to die as. And the state of healthcare is such that changing your body is as expensive, time-consuming, and painful as going to a salon to get your hair dyed. Hell, I was born “female,” and am still the proud owner of a vagina. And absolutely no one is going to tell me what to do with it.
Perhaps most importantly: our arguments were about how to go forward, not about how to go back. Only now do I appreciate just how civil and productive those “fights” were. Our society was not obsessed with this notion of “the good old days” because we believed we could create better days ahead.
Unfortunately, thanks to “The Safe Zone,” I have been turned into someone desperate to go back. But I can’t. I never could.
So as furious as I am at Lady Sera and whatever other forces conspired to destroy my universe, I am equally as heartbroken for everyone who is now as dispossessed as me, but forced to live every day in the distorted image of the place they thought was home.
