Fully. Vaccinated.
Seeing our closest friends again, in the house, without masks. Eating a meal with more than the same three faces around our table. Holding the people I love, whom I’ve had to cross my arms over my chest to keep myself from reaching for, for a year.
Nothing much more will change in our behavior beyond that. We are riding out the rest of the school year at home, unwilling to take on the additional risk of group interaction and expend the energy to make such a major change in routine this close to the last stage of both this pandemic and the summer. We won’t be doing anything unmasked indoors nor spending any length of time in groups, masked or not, indoors or out. We might get takeout. We might visit more or different stores.
What will change is the level of stress and worry we feel while we continue the best practices for keeping ourselves and others safe. Our child will ride bikes and play with kids whose parents are also fully vaccinated, and they will still wear masks and I will not worry about how close they get to each other. I will walk with my fully vaccinated friends and we won’t wear masks and I won’t worry about how close we veer to each other. We will sit in the yard and enjoy a distanced meal with fully vaccinated friends, and we might pull our chairs closer so we don’t have to boom quite as much. We will walk our new puppy and not worry about how close our masked neighbors get when they bend in to experience his excitable softness.
We will begin to shake off the dust of anxiety, grief, and feral introversion and begin to live together again. We will laugh together and forgive our wide and varied weirdnesses.
If you wanna come back, it’s alright.