There was a time before the world was ending. It’s hard to credit this now, when the world is ending so much and in so many different ways, but there was a time when the current of events ran so counter to the eschatological instinct that the instinct was overwhelmed by optimism.

You might have been there. You might have been fourteen in 1989, old enough to grasp the power of the moment unfolding in Eastern Europe but too young to understand its impossibility: a century of war and oppression dissolving into candlelight vigils and crowds of denim-jacketed ordinary people sitting peacefully atop a wall.

You might have been at a high school dance, skinny in a patterned cardigan and a Huey Lewis mullet, or in a poufy-shouldered red dress with your bangs teased up, dancing to songs by Paula Abdul and INXS and Living Colour, or maybe to Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” a song you might have assumed was just telling you what adults were always telling you: that you should want this part of your life to last forever.

You might have been fifteen in 1991, behind the wheel of a balky Nissan, trying to ignore your driving instructor’s lecherous commentary about a group of bridesmaids on the sidewalk, when Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” came on the radio and you were suffused with a faith that everything was aligned: the blue sky, the end of the Cold War, the prospect of being able to drive yourself downtown this summer.

You might have been twenty on a spring day in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, 1996, browsing a cheerful display about the advent of the Euro while a group of teens strolled past, arms around one another, singing “Wonderwall.”

You might have wondered whether all this optimism would hold up to scrutiny, but who were you to question the forces of history?

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Full essay available in Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College (Issue 7), 2021.