Of the world before;

"In an inhumane world we forget how to be something we simply are; human".

One day it just stopped, the only world we had, or ever knew. They had said it would happen. That the world would end. That billions would die. That we wouldn't ever be able to start again, not like we had before, when the world was bigger and much of it unknown.

Our tools would be gone, our knowledge and progress lost; humankind would forever be returned to the age of stone, if any remained.

Some would, surely. They must. In corners of the globe, remote from the chaos that would ensue. Where the effects of the collapse were less devastating or the people less reliant on the outside world.

That the world might end, who could have thought otherwise? History was full of such things, empires falling and plunging their world into darkness and disorder.

The desperate dreams of a declining age aside, dreams of colonized planets and a technological wonderland which could, just maybe, allow ourselves a solution to this harsh world.

But it did end. It came to a grinding halt, with all the inertia of a thousand years and more.

Breaking under its own weight, from changes long forestalled, of its inhuman complexity and inhumane construction.

With so much wealth in so few hands and so little food in so many stomachs, in hindsight, this collapse was inevitable; social, economic and political.

Science had failed us in the end, providing wonders barely dreamed of before, yet failing to create a world to satisfy our human soul.

This world of ours? It isn't some utopian dream, nor is it quite the dystopias we'd been taught to fear; it is something else entirely.

Our burden is not the cruel caress of a dictator, nor the enslavement of some unfeeling intelligence, born of machine. It is worse, to us, unimaginably so.

Bitter, inescapable knowledge; the constant reminder of our new life and it's terrible cost.

The price of endless forests and swarming seas, abundant food and unfiltered air, was it seems; the loss of teeming billions who once had dreamed and loved and laughed.

Not in some irradiated apocalyptic wasteland, some bawdy Hollywood tale; in the simple grinding out of an average and unfulfilling existence, in the shadow of those deemed rich and powerful and worthy.

While we had been busy making smaller, ever faster machines, seeking our freedom on the knife's utter edge, on some immense technological mountain. Something else had been going on, something undetected by our scared and hurried, frenetic lives.

Somehow, in our obsession with efficiency and productivity, in our single minded eagerness to cram ever more onto ever thinner wafers, we forgot something relatively simple.

That we moved through vast unknown spaces, on a ball of similarly immense and incomprehensible proportions, that this ball was made from all the things so valued for our tools, so painstakingly mined, by sweat and blood and often tears.

We thought too small, thinking it was in the very small we would find that something more from life. Forgetting the bigger picture.

Forgetting even that we were human and what that meant, separate from our machines and systems, with needs and wants greater than the simple need for machine born power and systematic order.

We thought the next revolution would be smaller, not to fit into the palm of your hand, but into the very cells of that hand. But we were wrong. This revolution was so, so much bigger.

Instead of the miniature, we had unwittingly discovered; or perhaps played a role in creating, the macroture of our unknown dreams.

We don’t fully understand how this world came to be or yet fully what it is, maybe we never will.

When the world ended, when everything we had reached for, strove towards and hoped for came to a stop. When the lights went out, forever, so we then thought, something unexpected occurred.

At the time, little of this was apparent, aside from chaos and the panic of those around us.

Later, some likened it to a hard reset. As if the world had been some immense computer, not an intricate mass of human life, with its hopes and dreams, amid an ocean of others.

Lives were lost in that time between, when things were still changing. When uncertainty and confusion were at their highest. When the transition was least apparent. When hope was most lost.

As we became aware of the changes of that dark night, as the morning of our world dawned, so our realisation, that while the world had stopped, it hadn't ended. As they had said it would, as we had so feared it might.

And so, as after a battle of times past, we grieved and honoured both living and dead; those whose sacrifice had allowed our world to exist.

And so we grieve still, in full knowledge of the futility of our past; not that of one grieving for the loss of a singular life, but of the world grieving for its own long collective life.

We are grateful for the world we came to possess, aware too, of the price that was paid.

Had we been less hurried, less frantic, less distracted and more aware of ourselves and our world, the changes occurring beneath our feet would have been noticed sooner, our efforts could have been directed down different paths and our instruments would have been capable of detecting what lay below.

In all, the price would have been less.

No, we don’t live in one of the dystopias we were taught to fear. We live in a world made aware of its foolishness, its hubris, a world alive with the grief of its loss, a world broken by bitter and inescapable knowledge; that things hadn't needed to be that way. That life could have been different, for longer than we can bear to think.

And yet for all that we grieve now, if nothing else has changed, the symbols of love are no longer as they were. The beauty of cold metal has been usurped, by that deeply human way; that of beating heart unbridled, of eyes unwavering, of love unrestrained.

And so, a silver locket, simple in design yet marvelous now in its tawdry beauty, rested in a field come forest.

It seemed fitting, for afterall, it's maker had fashioned it to the shape of a heart.