The year is 2020 and Logan is at college. His parents are doing their best to return to some sort of normalcy, but it’s strange without their son.<\/p>\n
Logan comes to stay over weekends and is consistently met with the sort of thought out meals he’d usually think of as birthday dinners. There is no takeout to be seen, just roasted potatoes, homemade lasagnas, and everything else he knows his mom and dad can cook.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He doesn’t say anything, but what he really wants is basic takeout from their local Chinese restaurant. He knows it would hurt his parents feelings, but cold lo mein tastes a lot more like home than the brisket his mom made that one Easter four years ago. It isn’t a reflection of how ‘good’ his parents were that he thinks of pizza and sweet and sour chicken as home. They had better things to be doing than working in the kitchen all day. Hell, all he wants is to play their weird family mix of Monopoly and Clue and eat some bad pizza. People often associate takeout and quick foods as signs of the ‘hurry up and go’ families who don’t spend time together, but as valid as those families are, take-out families come in all shapes and sizes. Logan’s family happens to be a ‘hurry up and hang out together’ family, which doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.<\/p>\n
He tells them about school and how things are going. He spends his Saturday with Mom and Dad, and spends most Sundays catching up with David. He helps out at the BookNook when they let him, and settles very comfortably into routine.<\/p>\n
There’s talk about the new plague going around, but it’s mostly ignored by our family at first. There had been other talks about other plagues in the past and generally it had always been someone else’s circus and monkeys. They’d worry a bit, when it came up on the news in the 2012 era, and then it would come to nothing. They have no real reason to have learned that these things would effect them. Like bomb-strikes and shootings and war on the news, it’s not effecting their area of the world and it gets filtered out as white noise.<\/p>\n
It’s not our family’s fault, although it seems sick and sad from an exterior or even an affected perspective. Someone who’d been part of the reality Kelly and Michael naturally filter out would accuse them of lacking empathy, but that isn’t what it is. If everyone felt every ten million deaths by cancer every year as proper grief, we’d be incapacitated. It’s simply how it has to be. Books and media can sometimes help us to understand for a moment what it’s like for someone else, but no one can be obligated to learn it. And maybe not everyone even should.<\/p>\n
Kelly, Michael, and Logan dismiss the current plague as background static until suddenly it’s right on top of them. Logan’s collage announces they’re moving to remote learning, and suddenly he’s installing a program to allow him to view his professors on video call. Logan is coming home for ‘a few weeks’. He and his parents laugh because there is nothing else they can do, and Logan gets his wish of getting takeout every night. The BookNook closes its doors for the safety of its customer base, and everything suddenly feels very, very weird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The year is 2020 and Logan is at college. His parents are doing their best to return to some sort of normalcy, but it’s strange without their son. Logan comes to stay over weekends and is consistently met with the sort of thought out meals he’d usually think of as birthday dinners. There is no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[639],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thesimsoverthinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56030"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56035,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56030\/revisions\/56035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}