We can’t save each other

I’ve got a friend, who I’ll call Bambi because she’s got these big, quivering eyes that make you want to wrap her up and protect her from the cruel world. She’s adorable but spacey. She’s always had one foot in a different universe where making daisy chains is a full-time job. We’re not close-close. But we’d share noodles after work or get a coffee sometimes. Like we did last week for the first time since July.

We flopped down in the park, and I pulled out my iPhone to show her how to do the double-click vaccine pass shortcut.

‘‘Have you seen this?’’ I said, trying to bounce energetically up the steps of our friendship again, ‘‘it’s way easier, no awkward pause while you look for it …’’

She looked up at me sharply – and my stomach dropped. I’d jumped blindly onto a step in our friendship that wasn’t there. The last three years quivered in thin air, then crashed down to the distant bottom of a dark stairwell:

‘‘Oh, I haven’t been vaxxed …’’ she said, looking quickly away.

I swallowed. She paused. Then she began to gabble, hands waving, big eyes shining, overflowing with Bruce Willisesque certainty that no-one understands the danger the world is in! She needed to save me. Save all of us. From the vaccine, big pharma, the media’s complicity, the global conspiracy …

I listened to her talk, feeling rising damp spread numbly up the walls of my brain.

It had never occurred to me that conspiracy theorists could be sweet and lovely. I’d seen flickers of anti-vax in my friendship circles – a mate’s elderly Dad who’s filling his empty days with YouTube, or a friend’s awful boyfriend who won’t be told what to do by no-one, bro.

But not this. Not someone who, until now, I’d always thought of as one of those kooky, homegrown angels who remind you that goodness still exists in the world. But yes, her. Someone had crawled out of her phone, slithered in her ear, and was feeding on the softest, tenderest parts of her heart.

Turns out that they’re good at it, too. Conspiracy theorists know exactly how to radicalise kind souls who never stop wanting to save the world. I was mad. No, not mad. I burned so brightly with rage you could have lit me up and used me as a floodlight for Eden Park.

I was furious. Furious at those sinister, shadowy forces who prey on the vulnerable. Furious at social media companies who sell off our weakness to them. Furious at a future where she might be lying in an intensive care unit because of them. Furious at myself for underestimating them. Furious at how hopeless it all feels …

Because how do you talk someone out of saving your life? That’s what she thinks she’s doing.

She’s on a crusade for my eternal soul. A digital age Jehovah’s Witness, full of terrifyingly good intentions, trying to claw us back from eternal damnation with pleading and relentless emails full of ‘research’… I can’t tell her it’s not real. It’s too real to her.

I get now why they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Because Bambi loved people. And someone saw that spring of effervescent, goofy goodness and poured oil in it.

They knew her unstoppable love meant she’d keep crusading until she ‘saved’ us all.

And I can feel the steady, cold drip of certainty trickling down my lungs into my stomach that says I can’t save her either.