Vox Meditantis

What’s the first impression you want to give people?

Monday, 16th November 2026

They always said the ice would speak if you listened long enough. I’ve been here three days now and all I hear is the cracking, this slow grinding death, like bones breaking under too much weight. The edge keeps calving off into the fjord below. Great sheets of it, ancient and blue, just… surrendering. I film it all, of course. Send it out into the void. Fifty-seven views on the last one. Fifty-seven people who bothered to watch the world ending in real time.

The storm’s building again. You can taste it on the wind, that peculiar sharpness before everything turns white. I should move back to the research station but I won’t. Can’t, really. They made it clear enough last week that I wasn’t welcome. Too intense, they said. Too uncompromising. As if there’s meant to be a polite way to scream that everything we love is drowning.

Marcus used to understand. We’d stay up half the night in that flat in Bristol, planning actions, drafting manifestos that nobody read. He had this way of making it all feel like we were building towards something, you know? Like the loneliness and the rage had purpose. We were going to be the generation that finally refused to look away. And then he got the job at the consultancy. Started talking about “realistic targets” and “incremental change” and “not alienating potential allies.” Started looking at me the way you’d look at a dog that’s gone feral.

What’s the first impression you want to give people? That’s what the therapist asked me, back when I was still pretending therapy could help. Before I realised it was just another mechanism for smoothing off the edges, making us palatable to a system that’s burning us alive. What impression? I wanted to say: I want them to feel what I feel. I want them to wake at three in the morning with their hearts hammering, thinking about the feedback loops and the tipping points and the children who’ll inherit ash. I want them to understand that niceness is a luxury we can no longer afford.

But I didn’t say that. I said something about wanting to seem approachable, reasonable. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? You perform sanity even when sanity means complicity.

The ice here is older than civilisation. Older than agriculture, than writing, than every human achievement we’re so bloody proud of. And it’s melting into the sea at a rate that would have seemed impossible even five years ago. The scientists at the station talk about it in careful, measured tones. Anomalous warming patterns. Unprecedented loss of mass. They quantify catastrophe like it’s just data.

I tried to explain it to Sarah before she blocked my number. Tried to make her see that you can’t bring children into a world like this, can’t make plans for futures that won’t exist. She said I’d become exhausting. That I’d turned into one of those people who make everything about their one issue, who can’t just have a normal conversation anymore. And maybe she’s right. Maybe I have forgotten how to talk about anything else. But how do you chat about television shows when the Greenland ice sheet is in terminal decline? How do you care about Christmas plans when we’ve already lost?

The storm’s getting closer now. The sky’s gone that strange yellowish-grey that means heavy weather. I should probably secure the equipment, but there’s something hypnotic about watching the clouds build. Like watching an army mass on the horizon. Marcus used to joke that I had a martyr complex. “You don’t want to save the world, mate,” he said once, after too many pints. “You want to be the one who’s right when it ends.”

He wasn’t wrong. There’s a sick comfort in knowing you saw it coming, isn’t there? In being able to say: I warned you. I tried.

But God, I’m tired. Tired of being angry all the time. Tired of waking up alone in tents and hostels and borrowed rooms, surrounded by people who’ve also burned through all their old friendships in service of something bigger. We tell ourselves we’re warriors, that we’re the ones brave enough to face the truth. But late at night, when the wind’s screaming across the ice, it just feels like we’re the ones who couldn’t figure out how to hold onto anything soft.

The glacier groans beneath me. Another fracture spreading through the ancient ice. I’ll film it when it goes, send it out to whoever’s still watching. Maybe it’ll make a difference. Probably it won’t.

The storm’s nearly here. The first flakes are already falling, small and hard as shrapnel. I should go. But there’s something about being out here on the edge, watching the world crack apart, that feels more honest than anything waiting for me back in the warm. At least here, the destruction’s visible. At least here, you can’t pretend.

Marcus, if you ever listen to these – and you won’t, I know you won’t – I just wanted you to know that I miss you. Miss having someone who understood why it matters. Why we can’t just… move on.

The ice remembers everything, they say. Traps it in layers, year after year, century after century. All our pollution, all our carelessness, frozen in the record. And now it’s all melting out, releasing what we tried to bury.

I suppose that’s what I’ve become. Something melting out of the ice. Something nobody wants to see.

The storm’s here.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.