Why? 2K

I can still hear the screaming, like it was yesterday, when it was in fact over ten years ago. I was on the other side then, trying to make my way through. Everyone remembers it differently. Everyone believes they dealt with the issue, but it was a cover-up. The truth is at one minute after midnight on 1 January 2000 all the computers located in the area of Greenwich Mean Time did crash, and hour after hour around the globe the rest of them followed. All the geeks were too busy celebrating their ascendance to hear the screaming.
There was a twenty-four hour portal which many of us, barely holding on, stepped through, and after it closed, there was no going back. In the middle years around ’05 it was easy to pass as an average citizen; so many were looking the other way.
Now with all the available micro-works, it would be simple enough to return, if anyone wanted to, but not me. I’m having too much fun. Would a bit of charcoal thrown from a grill fire want to jump back in and be wholly consumed? I think not.
We, who came through that day, all bear our scar like some glorified war wound, when the truth is: as we recognize each other, we keep walking in silence, never allowing our shame to rise to the level of guilt. Like a pigeon on a sill or a cockroach in a picnic basket, I go about my parasitical way until one day you might look in a mirror and not be able to tell if I were standing behind you or we were the same person.
Although I recognize many of you, I won’t give away your secret. Thrive and prosper. None of the civilians could cite the reasons you know all that you do. We are all living on borrowed time, on the threshold, as it were, between what was and what was meant to be, and so long as we keep our balance, no one need take it too seriously. In fact, the sound I took for the memory of impassioned screams may have just been the wind passing through a keyhole.
Yes. Indeed, that's all it was.