from early in a pandemic

You wake up and read the news, followed by an anxious shit. You are largely confined to your house. You start to feel a throat tickle, a cough – question if it’s dry – monitor your pulse. Take your temperature. Go out to the store in a face mask or cloth or fabric or just hold your breath. Does that work? You return with things that immediately get put into the sink to be disinfected or sanitized and it’s hard to think of any type of food as dirty. You put things away, choke back some oatmeal and coffee. You said you would check in with someone yesterday but you couldn’t muster the energy so you check in today. Someone else checks in on you. You google ways to volunteer. You mask yourself back up to deliver bleach to someone you don’t know and on the way to their doorstep, someone runs by in designer athletic wear and you’re plum dropped in a dichotomy of existence, this existence, every existence leading up to this. It is not a universal experience. Social distancing is a privilege. You get back home and attempt to work a little. Your video may cut in and out because your entire block is home weighing on the network. But at least you have access which allows you to start rewatching a series from twenty years ago. You check the news again even though the death and case numbers only get updated once a day, in the morning, after the department of health has made all their calls. You sift through old pictures back to the last time you saw friends. You order takeout for lunch. You pick it up from someone wearing gloves and a mask at a side window and you walk it home. You transfer it to a plate and wash your hands. You’re always washing your hands. You scrub so hard they’re chapped.

You realize your nervous system hasn’t taken a break all day so you try to slip into the bath with salts and a podcast. No, music. No, silence. Your dog comes in and sniffs the water. You return to your bath. You tell your body to focus on itself but as soon as it feels a little pressure on your chest, the mindfulness test fails. You try to find beauty in the impermanent, including your own. You stand from the tub and towel off. Look at yourself in the mirror but see nothing. It’s somehow already 2:30 in the afternoon and the sun is out. You see people congregating in groups. You try not to judge because we’re all trying our best but privilege and white authority but our best but empathy but our best but no sense of false urgency but people are dying in droves and decision making is frozen because we never thought to prepare because we never came together to talk about what would happen when this happened because someone has stock in a magical drug that doesn’t work and other people need it because the system is broken. You return home and wash your hands and your mask and rinse your glasses and then pet your dog. You feed your dog. You feed yourself. You take your dog on a walk that you aren’t really sure she enjoys anymore. You video chat with a friend who works in an ER and you want to drive to them and squeeze them and tell them it’s going to be okay and they’re trying to tell you they can’t guarantee anything will be okay. This is going to go on for a while. You talk about the things you might do someday when we can do things together but it’s hard to imagine feeling comfortable doing that without masks or distance or will we ever wrap arms around each other and dance at a concert outside with beer and drop things in public and eat them off the ground anyway? Everyone I love who smokes please quit smoking.

You start coloring an adult coloring book and tracing lines and lose track of all the activity for a minute and it feels guilty. You look up and it’s only 6:00pm and you need to make dinner. What will bring you comfort? You make pasta and you return to another activity which you used to love where you read but now you read only a few pages and look up or read only a few pages and check the news or read a few pages and have to re-read them. You need a good fucking cry. You text someone else or hop on a slack or join a video call. You look up memes or reorganize a drawer. You sit outside and let the sun talk to your forearms. You take your pulse. You walk barefoot on grass. The world suddenly feels so dirty – nothing can be trusted. You’re scared to check your temperature. You read an article about a woman who lived through the last pandemic. You hear about a friend who lost their job. You have nothing to offer them. You buy a gift card to your favorite restaurant that might not be open when you’d finally be able to use it. You try to meditate. Do a stretch. Lift a weight. Sit in a chair. Exist. You are just existing. You are still. You move to bed and leave a light on and there is more of the same news but it’s new and you read it and you try to sleep and your dreams are wild and alive more than you felt in the day and they keep you awake and you fall half way back asleep and you wake up and read the news. When our days become circular, we realize time isn’t what we thought it was. I can’t define it any better now, I just know it’s been debunked.