Emoticon takeover

Date: 2/16/2019

In the 2,016th year they stopped using words to describe their feelings and opinions. They exchanged both encouragement and derision in the form of digital hieroglyphs conjured on small screens at will. They shunned all binary classifications as a brutal and unnecessary simplification of their complex human experience. They stopped feeling comfortable with the idea of right and wrong being opposite. They were obligated to make up their mind if they wanted to be heard. Their grandparents stopped talking to them. They designated icons of vegetables and fire as colloquial stand-ins for body parts and the notion of beauty or a good time. They remember being anonymous online, all the time. They still remember when the words got shorter, then slowly found themselves littered with faces formed from punctuation. They remember when cash turned into checks, turned into cards, turned into chips, turned into a string of code. They forgot all original etiquette. They were easily bought, won over by new, man my 'tis sore nuanced pictures of faces feeling things they have never felt but might someday.