‘Those who scream together, meme together’. We raked the ashes of war and rummaged the posturings of peace for memes, scrabbling for new material as for oxygen masks on a lurching aeroplane. Terrorism or inflation, diplomatic crisis or political clownery, we just laughed, a whole generation with less than half an ounce of hope left, and we made sure the memes were good. Empathy is a sad sickness, a knowing, not there but for the grace of God go I, but – there I do go, on the morrow if not this very day. It gnawed the walls of our breaking hearts like a termite, this pain we could not cast out, so we buttressed our crumbling fortresses with memes instead. When we were making memes, stealing them, or simply reposting them, the wry, cynical grimaces were for the bleak jests themselves, the grins of anticipation for the eager replies, the ‘lol same’ and ‘ong fr fr’ from the strangers like us, for the reassurance that everyone else was just as screwed up, that their first thought, when they heard of some fresh outrage or catastrophe, was also, aha, but the memes, the memes. Now, even this last bastion has fallen. We are left feverishly scrolling our feeds with numb fingers, seething until we combust. When you kill six children an hour, the memes die too.
Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric photographer from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Pleiades, Miracle Monocle, Glassworks, Windsor Review, Moria, CommuterLit, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.