One Day We Woke Up on Mars

One September, we woke up to find that something was wrong with the light. We had become more and more trapped in our houses by the smoke from wildfires raging out of control across California, on top of the ongoing battle against COVID. At this point, there were no guarantees of a vaccine in the foreseeable future. And then one day, it seemed the sun didn’t rise. On this morning, the smoke mixed in a disastrous way with the marine layer of fog to form a dull orange tint. It was one of those moments where I wondered what would happen if the pandemic, the subterranean light, never ended. The next day, the light regained its color and we went back to work as usual, but looking at the pictures reminds me that we can’t really know exactly what will happen tomorrow.