Love Letter to the Pandemic, 2021

Who have I become, these past 13 months? I was once a crazed social butterfly, booked four nights a week or more – friends and dinners and drinks, oh my!  Concerts!  Lectures!  Plays!  The frantic scheduling and unscheduling, the endless juggle to make it all come out right, to balance the life without with the life within.  All gone.  Suddenly, I’m an introvert in an extrovert’s skin. 

My life has grown small, quiet, and tidy, regular as a clock – the same, every day, every week, and all of the months.  

Every Tuesday, I do laundry, eagerly looking forward to the invigorating detergent aroma wafting up from the basement to our apartment, a good smell, righteous, one that reminds me we are healthy and alive, and can do our own laundry.

Every Wednesday, I drive to my sister’s and work from there, surrounded by lapping dogs, their fluff and love.  I put in a full day, with the occasional pause to kiss a pup, cuddle a cur, pat a pooch. 

Every night I go into the BF’s office, a smoky womb, for a cocktail and a snuggle, and we watch movies together – a new habit for us, and no small feat, as the BF is an incorrigible talker and he’s lucky he’s alive after all these months.  We’ve watched the 100 Best Films of All Time, as adjudged by someone, and re-judged them ourselves…

We’ve watched dozens of episodes of South Park, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, endless documentaries of all stripes, hundreds of street food and cooking videos, and listened to hours upon hours of music. 

Every night, I go to bed at 12:30, and I awaken at 8:30, and I make the BF’s coffee, in the cold, stale air of the apartment, and I warm the room with low lights and a space heater, and make myself breakfast – eggs and avocado toast or eggs and rice and furikake, or salmon cream cheese on crackers, or the errant mandarin, sweet and juicy. 

And I sit in my living room at our dining room table and I work, in the quiet, in the hush, under no fluorescents, to the gentle drone of NPR streaming.  I sit for hours, alone, joints hardening, stiffening body melding with the cheap office chair I purchased a few months in.  There is no idle chit-chat in the copy room, there is no strolling over to the candy lady’s desk, there is only this quiet home.  Sometimes, there is a Zoom staff bingo happy hour.

I cook I clean I bake I sweep I mop.  I do my PT exercises, I take a walk. 

Saturdays, I grocery shop for the three of us, and then head to my sister’s, and we loll about wantonly, or make fresh pasta, or crack crabs, or order in – Thai noodles, sushi, ribs, Italian subs, or Korean BBQ.  We binge shows, laugh, pause, love on a dog, break up a fight, marvel at this existence. 

It is a meditation that I go through, every week, and I love it, the sameness, the non-surprise of it, the predictability.  It is my church.

I don’t get pedicures, I don’t dry clean anything, I don’t have my hair cut, marveling at its new hippie length, I don’t wear dresses or tights or hard-soled shoes.  My life has grown soft and small, as I have grown soft and large.  Even my sports bras bind.  I take a cursory swipe at forming a cat’s-eye with eyeliner if I have to Zoom that day, but wear a slick of lipstick under my mask always, as some habits are hard to break.  The hair may be dirty and tied up, or it may be a red letter day, when it gets washed and dried and emerges fluffy and shiny and smells oh so fresh, falling lightly around my face, a clean curtain.  And those are the best days, when I’m home and warm and clean and going nowhere.  Every day on the calendar is blank, and there is no balancing act. 

Even Zoom calls can feel like a tug, an obligation on my time, my precious time, even though I love and miss my friends, and look forward to the weekly chats that have me seeing some of them more than I would have Back Then.  My precious time…. 

Because this time feels like a gift.  Yes, it’s a gift to the living, to the healthy, to the fortunate, but nonetheless, a gift, one that will end someday, and I will miss it.  And again and again, I know I’m fortunate.  I have my health and a job, and I’m not alone.  I live with my love, my best friend, and the only other person I’ve seen for the last year-plus is my sister, my other best friend. 

One day, I will have to put adult clothes on, absurd with buttons and zippers, and pay someone to make my hands look like a human lady’s, and I will have to walk to a public conveyance and face the press of humanity in the cold light, but oh!  I don’t want that quite yet!   I will emerge too soon, like a dull chrysalis, blinking at the light, not ready to unfold papery wings…

What am I afraid of?  With the protection of Johnson & Johnson looming over my head, I wonder who I will even be in The New World.  Will I remember how to hug without recoiling?  Do I have anything to talk about, anything new to add to the social fabric, a conversation starter, an anecdote, a quip?  Did I ever?  Or will I stare dumbly, from a corner, watching in horror as my beloved friends engage in close-talking, gathered round a table, chewing and laughing and breathing, in and out, witty, carefree and unmasked?  Will I hold my breath at my first visit to a museum?  Will I scurry away at the first approach of a bartender, offering me a well-crafted cocktail after all these months? 

Even now, as I pass restaurants that are open to whatever capacity, I gawk at those optimistic souls sitting within, eating, imbibing, laughing, eyes shining, as if the whole world hadn’t gone topsy-turvy for the last year.  I avert my gaze, and slink back to the apartment.

I know it can’t go on forever, this gift of time.  But for now, I want to stay in my cocoon just a little longer, with my creaking joints, limping down the stairs like an old, hoary she-crab, gimpy from arthritic knees and the good old groin tear.  I want to scuttle slowly back up the stairs of our building, carrying the laundry basket astride one hip, like a Van Gogh peasant in fuzzy slippers, and sit in the warm golden air of my living room with all my things around me – things I used to leave alone every day, for hours at a time.  Will they miss me? My books, my red velvet lounge, my bamboo lamp… they have grown accustomed to me, to my scent, to my breath upon them.  And to be in my neighborhood with all the people that live around me, that I can hear out the window, living lives in a multitude of tongues, people that I don’t have to meet except in passing, masked, with breath held, edging backward if they come a little too close, even as we all crinkle our eyes at each other over our masks. 

I’ll treasure this gift for a little while longer, live in its smallness, bask in its indulgence.  And when I emerge, hopefully I’ll no longer be afraid.