They started calling it “the Shift” because naming it felt like the only power anyone had left. While studios filled with arguments about probabilities and fault lines, the world outside learned a different language: the weight of shared flashlights, the quiet choreography of neighbors knocking on doors, the warmth of a stranger’s coat over shaking shoulders. The disasters did not arrive with meaning attached; people had to write that part themselves, in hand-lettered signs and borrowed generators and awkward, necessary apologies.

When the sirens finally thinned to memory, almost no one trusted the phrase “back to normal.” Normal had been exposed as a story told for convenience, not a promise that could hold. What grew instead was smaller and slower: meals stretched across more plates, plans made with exits in mind, and a rough, stubborn agreement that whatever fragile world came next would not be built alone.