(This is a draft that I stopped working on, but I found it interesting)
The Post-2010s Victims of Amazon
I walked through White Flint Mall before the crews demolished it.
In the main atrium lay the terraced fountain where couples flicked pennies for good luck. Now drained. The angle where my mother shot a Polaroid of me in 2005.
Time and again, I've thought of the mall as an “edge” where the veil between heaven and earth hangs loose. Malls sublimate concrete phenomena into a foggy ritual—devotees ambling about the promenade, a gyromancy of fetishized wealth.
But then the temple was destroyed, its hymns forgotten.
One of the final cuneiform tablets records a lament from Inanna, goddess of love and war, relating how her once-powerful Akkad had fallen to invaders and become dust.
The ziggurats of the Sumerians, the people who obeyed her, held an altar and plinth for their gods. The first poems in existence were chanted in Inanna’s name. Icon of power and harmony.
We who straddled the millennium, established kiosks, a food court, and glass elevators. Our gods are implied; they are symptoms of oedipalization, or opiates of the masses, or long-held tradition.
Future civilizations will ask of us what we declined to confront ourselves: did you know what you had wrought?
It was nothing, our artifacts will say, compared to what came after us.