I was sitting at my desk just one moment ago when things began to feel increasingly compressed. I say it was only one moment ago, but I do not have any evidence of how long ago it was because my clock is not working. My clock is, sort of, falling into itself. At first I thought it was a glitch. That I had once again accidentally deleted some file that keeps my operating system functioning as it is supposed to, but now I am not so sure. Everything around me has been acting in a similar disquieting fashion for what feels like 20 minutes, or perhaps some unfathomably longer amount of time. It is impossible to tell how long because things are floating. Things are floating and falling into other things in a strange way. This is what happened to my digital clock. The lines that comprise each digit started floating into the lines of other digits and now all the digits have blurred together to form four blurry digital blocks. The stack of paper is sort of floating over to the edge of my desk, and it looks as if it might soon fall off if I don't figure out what to do about so many things moving in this strange way at once. Things are floating and falling into other things in the world around me and on my screen. It may be that we are in the middle of a massive earthquake that has been digitally time-stretched and put on a never ending twenty-four hour loop. I might try to stop the papers from falling off my desk, but at the same time, there is a milkcrate full of oversized books that I stupidly placed on a shelf above my head some time ago. Now I am not sure what to do first — stop the papers from spilling off my desk, or prevent the oversized books from falling onto my head. Ultimately it does not matter which I choose to do first because it seems as if my feet are glued to the floor, and so I have no choice at all about what to do. My feet and my seat seem to be entrenched in an amalgamation of increasingly thickening air and disintegrating floating material with a deep fried, ocean-like effluvium. I fear I will never sit anywhere else ever again except in this seat. I am not sure if this is merely a panic attack — a symptom of debilitating agoraphobia — or if something about the universe has broken. Perhaps God has entered the chat. God has arrived on the screen and in my office room, and he has slammed on the brakes of time. I do not mean to brag or say I told you so, but I was afraid this might happen. That something in the atmosphere would attack the central nervous system in such a way that we would all stop perceiving time. I feared this, but I did not think it would actually happen to the extent it is happening now — that time would physically become flat and we would get stuck. But maybe also something physical has happened to the universe, like the solar system, sort-of, fell off its axis, and the sun’s gravity has changed, freezing orbits, holding the Earth rotating in a singular position, year after year, so now we live in a fish sandwich that is slowly melting. This might explain why light has smeared across the air like a thick blob of yellow paint shoved into a thick blob of brown paint, making thick creamy air. But who knows? Not me. It seems as if I might be having a panic attack, and my panic is the only thing preventing me from picking up the phone and letting someone know about all the terrifying things happening in my little office room at once.

A singular term seems to be forming on my screen. God, what is this horrible term? I have seen this term before. People in my feed were repeating it some time ago, over and over again. What is this burning emblem of human expression? I can’t remember it fully because my memory seems to be disintegrating, but it is starting to form on my screen. The digital lines are floating together. Soon it will form, and when it does, I know that it will be the term, and that term will be the only term for a long, long time.