Claire • 29 • she/her

i used to tell people i’m immunodeficient and they’d ask invasive questions about my diagnosis, whether my parents kept my childhood overly sterile, whether I was vaccinated as a child (with the implication that it would have been bad if I were).

Now that I say I have an immunodeficient family member at home, people smile knowingly and say, “oh, well you do what you have to do,” and “my mom went through chemo. I remember how hard it was to do all the precautions” and “that’s so kind of you.”

if i tell someone i mask because i’m disabled, i’m assumed to be the weak link in our society, a burden to my family.

You may have liked your artwork or you may have been like 'meh, not my best work', but literal hundreds of generations after you died, a person speaking a language you cannot understand, living in a future so alien to you that you couldn't possibly imagine it, made a sculpture of your art and shared it with thousands and thousands of people on a communication network that uses lightening inside flattened rocks and invisible waves of light that travels to where the stars live and back. And they all love it. Everyone who sees it is like 'aww, that's nice' or 'holy shit I love this'.

They never knew. They, their kids, and their kid's kids never knew that this would happen to that art.