covid19 – MOIRARTS

If You Wanna

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.

Day 365

We knew this day would come. One year ago, I was so anxious. I was a ball of tension waiting to collect my child and bring them home that Friday, knowing that schools and workplaces were closing all around us and having resisted the urge all of that week to keep us all at home ahead of the decision we knew was coming. Parents were distancing, we weren’t hugging, we were using hand sanitizer. My friends who are microbiologists were emphasizing all of this as absolutely necessary; I was closely following what had happened in Italy and stocking our pantry and freezer well ahead of our area’s shutdown.

This year, I learned the ways in which anxiety has served me and pushed back against the ways it has not. I have struggled to relax out of hypervigilance for decades; I felt a degree of relief when my nervous system’s level of alertness aligned with the events going on around me, even if only through the early part of the summer. Once my child and partner were both working and schooling from home, I was much less anxious. This was an actual full-blown crisis, and my body is calm in a crisis. It’s a state of being in which it expects to exist at all times, an expectation that causes so many problems for me when there is not a global pandemic during a rise of fascism threatening all our lives. Last year, my nervous system was like, look, see, I was right all along. There is a lot to be said for not being right sometimes.

It is not my desire to recap the entire year we all just lived through. It was awful. Many people died. Many people became and are now ill. From COVID, from isolation, from stress, from an inability to access necessary care for ongoing health conditions. It remains awful.

Somehow, we are all going to have to learn to live again. Newly. Now, in this post-2020 state. With our survivors’ guilt, with our grief, with the health impacts we don’t yet know the full extent of. I have been thinking a lot about the AIDS survivors I knew the 90s, mostly gay men who had either dodged HIV entirely or had lived long enough with HIV to arrive at the state where the drugs began to keep people alive for good. In 1997, a longtime survivor was someone who had lived with HIV for 10 years. We don’t even use that language anymore, but believe me when I say that survivors’ guilt around HIV endures among older LGBTQ people. Why me, why not me. All of us who are here now, still, will have to grapple with this, in ways we have likely been skirting the edges of throughout. Why me (with/out a job), why me (with/out an infection), why me (with/out a home), why my loved one, why a stranger.

I will say what activists and scholars have said for decades now about HIV/AIDS: there is no moral message in a virus. Who gets it, who does not. Who dies, who does not. There is no morality here, no good or bad. There are odds and chances, near misses and sudden deaths. We have survived. Others have not. It is not because of what any of us individually did or did not do, although it is true that systems and policies failed many of us in profound ways. We did our best in a situation largely beyond our control, made choices within frameworks presented to us, frameworks that are uneven and unequal. We can spend the rest of our days shrinking ourselves down to fit into a place of guilt or we can find a way to grieve and live.

Today, I dropped off a piece of art at a local art center, for consideration as part of a show of community work that will go up in a local coffee shop, a collage I made in an online class I took through them this fall. I am wearing a t-shirt commemorating an online concert by one of my favorite bands, streamed in the early month of the pandemic as a fundraiser for the food banks in their home state. I am typing this on the new computer I had to buy when it became clear that my old computer would not rise to the needs of the situation when we were all online all the time. Next to me is the new phone I eventually caved and purchased once I accepted that no one got my texts on time and I was largely unintelligible on my old phone, which had become the way I connected even with my friends on the next block. Farther into this room is my child’s work desk, with a school-issued computer; the repurposed train table now covered with LEGOs; a stack of books waiting to be read by authors I’ve supported through online book talks; my trusty paper planner that’s filled largely with notes about when I cooked what so that we don’t go through all of this only to die of food poisoning in the end.

There is nowhere to rest my eyes that doesn’t reflect some adaptation to what we faced last year. The question is: what situation do we find ourselves in now? Not just where do we go from here, but how. Just yesterday I talked to a friend on the phone and we vowed to embrace each other’s weird, awkward, un/inhibited behaviors when we see each other again. That’s what I wish for all of us, as we emerge blinking into the light of 2021. The pandemic is not over yet, but we can start to learn a new way of living, together.

Day 287

School started in earnest. Autumn came. Autumn went. I got completely overwhelmed by the horror playing out across the country. There was a hellish election that went on for ages as a cap to a hellish campaign cycle that went on for ages. Half the country thinks the results mean everything will be fine! great! normal! in a month and the other half think we’re now in a civil war. We adopted a dog. We had to give the dog back because it only tolerated one family member and charged and snarled at the other two. We agreed to get a puppy instead. There are no puppies. Every time I thought about returning to writing I could only focus on how long it had been and how little anything had changed except for the worse.

This week it’s been nine months since we started staying home and I’m starting to lose my shit. I hurt my back (neck? shoulder?) and it’s grinding at me. I forgot what it’s like to be in constant acute pain, forgot how irritable I am. Forgot how tender my child is when I’m irritable. I might be taking too much onto myself, but it did seem like we were doing okay until this rough patch. Which coincided with having to return a dog, the onset of gray winter days, and the complete lack of the usual holiday festivities at school, in the neighborhood, or with our families. Okay, so maybe it’s not all me. Still. We all failed to appreciate how much better I’d gotten until I got bad again.

I don’t have anything good to say about anything. My friends are teachers and they’re afraid of getting sick and deathly afraid of getting a family member sick. Same for my friends are who are doctors, nurses, social workers, restaurant workers, hairdressers. Same for all of us with chronic illnesses, disabilities, health risks that were typical but are now potentially deadly. It’s all terrible.

Here is something good: it snowed one half of an inch and my child was delighted and played outside for hours. Another thing: we successfully executed an allergen-free snickerdoodle. (Not a cookie I ever ate or made growing up, but I hear they’re popular among certain crowds.) One more: tomorrow I’m going in to get my neck patched up, the tree people are coming to take down the leaning cherry that’s been looming ever lower over the yard since we moved in, and as of noon we will have watched a virtual holiday show and be on winter break for the next 18 days. During which time we will eat cookies, read books, build Legos, watch for snow, and sleep as much as we can get away with.

Dig deep, winter ones. There’s no other way but through.

Day 200

Two hundred days. I don’t know why increments of ten are compelling here, as they don’t align with the weeks, months, or (I suspect) years that we will be doing this. Still, two hundred days seems like a long time, even more in light of the way the days and weeks are slipping by. We have acclimated to living in a pandemic even while thousands of people die each day, to a degree that is a bit mind-boggling. It seems like just last month that I was writing about Day 100, that I was marveling at how the weeks were running into one another. Blink, another 100 days. Blink, another 150,000 dead.

This week I’m thinking about what’s coming. For months, I’ve lived as much in the present as possible, trying to neither wallow in yearning for the past nor fear of the future. Foot in front of foot, day by day, sleep when I can, cook what I have to, read as much genre fiction as I need to numb my racing thoughts. Repeat repeat repeat. However, the seasons are changing, school is in session, winter is coming. All of it demands an assessment of where we are and where we’re going, a recommitment to principles, a recalibration of the machine.

First day of autumn. It feels significant, probably only to me and my addled sentimental brain, that the first day of this delightfully cool season aligns with our two hundredth day of pandemic distancing. This is when I would be taking stock of what needs to be done before winter, getting the cars repaired and the house battened down, calculating how much time in the weeks I have for my work now and determining what I want to do with that time. All of that is happening, but I was jolted into a realization that I need to take stock of our pandemic planning as well.

Winter is coming (har har, yeah) and it’s not going to be good. There is no way for it to be good. There is no vaccine coming to save us; the virus travels better (farther, faster, longer) in cooler drier air; indoor spaces become more dangerous; outdoor spaces become less available; and all of us want more than anything else to start being with other humans again in close contact. (Don’t we? I know I do.) I am looking at our plan to pod (bubble, quaranteam, whatever cute phrase we’re using) with another family like ours–one kid, two parents based at home, no family in the area, similar protocols for shopping–that seemed very reasonable over the past three months we’ve been discussing it and wondering if maybe I’m being completely stupid and we’ve lost our ever-loving minds. We undertook these UN-level negotiations out of a desire to have someone for our child to play with in the winter, to have other adults to converse with in the dark months, to have people other than the three of us to share a meal or a board game with as this drags on, et cetera. The lovely cool weather that I’m reveling in this week will ultimately mean we can’t all lounge in the yard for much longer.

I know that all of our choices are about managing risk, balancing the chance of dire health consequences down the line with the reality of negative health consequences accumulating every day this goes on. I’m not good at trusting other people, and even though I believe I’ve found another family as paranoid and mistrustful as I am (just kidding, but really), there’s no guarantee. No sure thing. Our brains and our moods are going to start urging us to take more risks because this has gone on so long and we’re struggling. Maybe that restaurant is okay (it’s not) or that BBQ will be fine (it won’t) or church will be good if we sit apart (nope again). Not that I’m planning to do any of these things, but the things we are doing–biking outdoors with other families, relying on distancing but not also masks for yard chats, bubbling up–seem reasonable to me. Maybe they’re just as ill-advised. Basically, my brain is locked in a cage match between I’m sure this one thing will be fine and WILL THIS BE HOW WE ALL DIE.

I have no answers. There is no conclusion. When I make it to the check-ins that are still a saving grace of this whole situation, many of us like to end with be safe, stay strong. Hold the line. Distance, mask, don’t hang out indoors. But as winter approaches, I really want to know that people living alone have a plan to get through it. I don’t want to advocate for podding, because who the hell knows if it’s safe, but I do want to hope that everyone has someone they’ll be able to hug this winter, some way, somehow. Please don’t crack and go to a bar and then the movies because you just can’t take it anymore. I really don’t want you to do that. We’re looking at another year, though, which is a long time. I really want us all to live through this, hearts and brains intact.

Be safe, stay strong.

Day 130

Thirty more days. Blink and a month went by. It got hot here, ushering in the time of year when I always start losing days to the fog of achy joints, migraines, and a generally sluggish pace of life. We’re still here, it’s just summer.

As the country goes off the rails, we have small bits of light. Our garden is home to young birds of many varieties: cardinals, robins, song sparrows, catbirds, wrens, woodpeckers, grackles, starlings, crows, a towhee. We watch them flop their way around the shrubbery as they grow wings; they catch moths and beetles in the grass and then, startled by their success, fly back to their parents to learn what to do next. Young rabbits slide under the gate and lounge in the clover, munching on flowers and then wriggling in the dust patch. A chipmunk appears inconsistently, darting so many places that it’s impossible to tell where it lives. There is so little to do, so we watch nature in real time, calling each other to the window to see the unremarkable yet always exciting appearance of one small creature or another.

My partner is still working from home, keeping us all in shelter, food, and books. The child and I fill our days with summer things, reading and watching cartoons, rousing ourselves reluctantly to cook dinner. (About which I regularly think, Every day? Really? Still?) Even before the pandemic arrived, we had decided to try a camp-free summer, after a school year that included, for the first time, evening swimming and after-school chorus. Then, after a spring of online meetings and homework submissions, the idea of online camp didn’t appeal at all. Instead, we lounge.

In the spring, we worked hard week after week to weed, edge, and prune the yard into something resembling a purposeful garden. We left a bit of wildness in the country style, plants spilling into each other whenever the crowding doesn’t create issues with mildew and rot. (It is, after all, a southern swamp here, no matter how much I’m striving to create a bucolic northern copse.) Now, we have only one patch of garden that didn’t get attended to before the temperatures rose above 90F and therefore won’t until they drop again. Now, we water the shrubs from the rain barrels and keep the birdbath filled with fresh cool water. We venture out as little as possible.

It seems irresponsible that a month has passed in this way, but what else could we do? We have also cautiously participated in swim team four mornings a week. I have gone to the store twice. We acquired frozen lemonade from the local coffee shop once, yesterday. I have attended online book talks, taken a writing course, participated in a scholarship committee. All of that is only as much as I would do in a typical month of summer, so I suppose it is enough. Throughout, we give to bail funds. We give to protest groups. We give to immigrant advocates. We give to support neighbors who have lost houses, jobs, family members.

We carry on.

won’t you celebrate with me

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

–Lucille Clifton

Day 100

One hundred days of quarantine. I will not make the obvious reference, but if I were to draw a parallel, you should know that I have always preferred Love In the Time of Cholera. Still we are here. We work, play, create, rest. In the first half of this month, I created a comic zine (my first!) about my vivid pandemic dreams, so my subconscious rolls on. On to the next 100 days, or at least into summer. We have weathered the longest day, now let the lazy ones begin.

Despite our neighbors no longer making even a pretense of distancing and businesses opening up, nothing fundamental has changed in the context of the pandemic so nothing will fundamentally change in our family’s practices either. We will wear masks, keep physically distant from people outside our family, undertake necessary shopping trips only, and have limited controlled interactions with friends. No restaurants, no cookouts, no cleaning people. Just us, the outdoors, and what we need to survive.

What do we need to survive? Food, shelter, income, things to read, and contact with others, certainly. I appreciate those people I see walking with friends (with masks) and having distanced yard dates (with masks). I know that this situation is particularly hard for extroverts who live alone, and we need to interact. I’ve started seeing my acupuncturist and PT again, on a much reduced schedule, because my function was decreasing and my pain increasing to a degree that I wasn’t okay with. My hair, though, will look all manner of wild for as long as it takes, as I won’t be using some of my limited tolerance for coming into close contact with others on getting a haircut. (Nor the dentist, so I’m grateful for all the care and repairs my teeth have received over the past three years.)

Today we celebrated Father’s Day with the resources at hand. Big bunches of hydrangeas from the yard, handmade cards with personalized coupons included, and a brunch fit for the awesomest parent in the entire world. All we need is right here.

Black Lives Matter protests

It’s the tenth straight day of ever-growing protests against police brutality across the United States and around the world. It’s our 86th day of coronavirus distancing. Everything feels simultaneously like too much and not enough.

As I’ve watched the street protests grow and grow and grow over the past ten days, I’ve been holding my breath. Waiting for the wave to break. Waiting for people to be intimidated back into their homes, for the numbers to dwindle down to a core of activists blocking highways, as has happened in the past. For the nice white liberals to change their profile pictures, post their beautifully graphically designed slogans, and go back to their lives. That’s how it’s gone every other time there’s been an outcry about a police murder of a Black person, a peak of interest and outrage and then a retreat, leaving me the lone voice of an angry sociologist ranting into the wind of the suburbs once more.

This time feels different. This time, coronavirus has already disproportionately decimated Black communities with job losses and deaths of family members. People have nowhere to go and nothing to do, nothing left to lose by being in the streets. At the same time, white people are home as workplaces and schools close, with nowhere to be and nothing to do to distract from the images of police violence and the voices of Black people. This time, it is harder to turn away, and we are all emotionally open in a way we have not collectively been in a long time.

What I see is not a dwindling, but a joining. I hear racist oppression and institutional violence named and described in the public discourse with a clarity and consistency that has not happened before in my lifetime. In the past I have heard endless cries of “why don’t they wait, why don’t they lobby”; this time, I’m hearing “of course people are angry, why shouldn’t they act.” I am not the only one in my neighborhood pushing back, I am not the only one arguing for action. Maybe these years since the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and thousands of others have mattered, maybe all of these various actions have made a difference. Maybe the accumulation of grief and anger in the spirits of white people has been happening in ways that haven’t been visible. Maybe, finally, we have reached a tipping point that will contribute to meaningful change in our systems.

I have a friend who works in international conflict resolution, and we sometimes argue about non-violence. I am not a pacifist, as much as I might aspire to be, and the arguments are usually about the social value of punching Nazis. My friend really is a pacifist at heart, and it grieves him to put more violence into the world, even if that violence might be necessary to push back fascism. When we talk about what it means to be non-violent in the face of racist state violence, I remember that the non-violence of Dr. King was always a strategy, a way of exposing white supremacist violence without being blamed for provoking it. When TV news broadcast footage of police officers beating and hosing protesters, of angry white mobs attacking Black students at sit-ins, the truth of those images was impossible to deny. There was no way to turn away, not without the shame of knowing that you were taking the side of the oppressor. White people acted because the violence of other white people was both undeniable and unconscionable, and they wanted to stand outside of it, not because they recognized in the non-violence of Black people something they had failed to see before.

This week, I have seen dozens of videos of cops attacking protesters and journalists. Opening fire with tear gas and rubber bullets, beating with batons, kicking and shoving people to the ground, ramming with bicycles and shields. People have been blinded, permanently and temporarily. At least one person has died after being sprayed full in the face, others have been shot to death. Whatever guidelines departments have in place, police have uniformly failed to follow them. None of these behaviors are isolated or unusual: when the cameras roll, the violence follows, in every city around the country once the daytime marchers with children go home, and sometimes before. As someone quipped on Twitter, “The amount of police brutality at the anti-police-brutality marches is proving a lot of points.”

This, then, is what the protesters are achieving: they are putting their bodies into the streets as the foil against which the intractability of police brutality will become undeniable. We are seeing these videos as they happen live on TV and the internet; they are being archived and rebroadcast, catalogued and used to challenge the city and county councils who have been so accommodating of this violence over the decades when the police have received more money than education, transportation, and health services. People are no longer willing to pay for this, no longer willing to believe that more violence makes us safer, no longer willing to accept the cops who stand by and do nothing as “good,” no longer willing to stand apart as those who are protected from the ones the police beat, no longer willing to have this done in our names or under the guise of keeping our children safe. We want all our children to be safe, we want our “we” to encompass those Black and brown people whom the police have treated as disposable for too long. We who cannot march need to keep pushing our officials, keep donating money to bail funds and to local organizations who have been doing this work for years.

We have allowed this by looking away. We are not looking away now.

Day 75

This week I am coming to terms with the fact that Phase 2 is coming and it’s going to last a long time. There is no single marker, no binary switch to flip, no way to know for sure if we’re in or out of one phase or another. All I know is this: for the past 10 weeks our household has been quarantined, making trips to the grocery store less than once a week and interacting with no one outside the three of us beyond a couple of shouted conversations with neighbors at a distance. We are not in a pod with any other families, we have not allowed anyone in our home nor gone into any other homes. We do go out to shop; we don’t get delivery or takeout of any kind. I put the packages in a detox zone (aka the top of the basement stairs) and wipe down the groceries, because that is what I feel comfortable with.

We will continue to do all of those things for the duration of this pandemic. I don’t need to engage in debates about how we conduct ourselves inside our homes, what’s necessary or not. I have decided that I prefer to wipe down the groceries and let the mail air overnight, so that is what I will continue to do until there is a vaccine. There is no reason for me to change that practice; it takes nothing from anyone and lets me feel like what is happening in my home is consistent, without having to assess its value or necessity. In that sense, the cleaning and physical distancing of objects, Phase 2 will be functionally similar.

The big question we are facing as summer looms is, basically: how much contact can we allow our child to have with their friends without triggering a panic attack in one of us? One of us is really me: my partner is comfortable with low risk high cost scenarios to the point that I may have once or twice accused him of being cavalier with my life, and my child is comfortable if we are comfortable. So that’s the question: am I comfortable?

This weekend we organized playdates for the first time, with families observing a similar level of isolation and disinfection protocols. None of our children are the type to be part of a massive horde of friends, so they have all been missing the close connections they’ve forged with each other. After accidentally biking together last week, we noted that everyone felt fine about it and decided to do it again on purpose. The kids cycled and then sat 10 feet apart on the sidewalk, laughing like loons and being ridiculous, until their rears got sore and they called it. Another day, we set up distanced blankets in the backyard so that our child could have lunch with a different friend; they are serious kids who observed the protocols perfectly, but it made my heart ache to see them craning toward each other, knees at the very closest edges of their respective blankets to each other.

How did it go? I don’t know. It was strange. It was good. I simultaneously felt like we were taking unnecessary risks and also that maybe we could do this all the time every day, it’s fine it’s fine it’s fine. I don’t do well in the middle, with gray areas. I don’t do well, mentally, with weighing risks and making choices. I really don’t do well when there is no good choice, no bad choice, no clear answer, just things to do or not do. If it goes well, I struggle with not knowing which of too many factors was the thing I assessed correctly; if it goes badly, I blame myself for probably missing something obvious, acting rashly, being a sucker, not weighing the right things in the right way, on and on and on. I become paralyzed and inactive.

All of this is why I’ve done so well at Phase 1, in terms of the smooth running of our household and my comfort with it. We chose the most conservative path for dealing with the risks of the situation, and we followed it. We have the ability to do so, so we did. Easy peasy, done. On some level, I could comfortably do this forever. On another level, it’s time to figure out the path for the next stage, the stage where we wear masks and interact with people from a distance and manage our contacts outside our homes until it’s safe to hug our friends again. We’re all craving it, we’re just not all willing to risk the same things to get it.

If I were the only one in charge of our plan, I would skip Phase 2 entirely. I would stay isolated in Phase 1 until I could go straight into Phase 3, “normal with vaccine plus extra more conscientious cleaning.” But the plan is not just for me, and what is probably fine for a 45 year old who has been through a lot of shit is not ideal for a 9 year old whom we’re trying to protect from lasting trauma. This is a grievously hard event that is going to last years and engender a series of painful losses. So far, we have not lost loved ones, although people I care about have and I grieve for them. So far, we have lost only school, connections with friends, and the place where we spend our summers. It has been so difficult to help our serious sensitive child focus on what is still good, on all the great things that happened in the half of the school year they did have and will happen in the new version of the summer we make for ourselves.

For at least the next six months, I will have to make choices about engaging with people who are also making choices about engaging with people. I will have to assess my assessments of whom I can trust, whom I can rely on to be telling me the truth about their safety practices, whom I care enough about seeing to risk it. I hate all that. You know, trusting my own judgment. (Knowing what my own judgment even is.)

Despite feeling like a walking 12-step platitude–one day at a time! focus on yourself!–I remain determined to get through this as intact as is possible, mentally, physically, and emotionally. I wish the same for all of you.

Day 60

As bizarre as this has been for us, we are starting to feel settled in our new routine. I hesitate to say normal, as there is the ever present mental tug toward the old, toward comparing our new reality with what we have known up until now. I resist that tug as much as I can, but resisting takes energy and contributes to the pervasive low-grade fatigue through which we move. I say we feel settled, though, as the initially pervasive mental resistance to our new situation seems to have eased.

We know that our child won’t be returning to their school building this year and we have accepted that. We see they have genuinely accepted it in the way that they express the eagerness for the school year to be over that we’ve seen every May. It’s a relief to see such a typical display of emotion, and the fact that said display moves me almost to tears is an immediate countersign that we are still swimming in uncharted waters. We, the adults, have accepted that there will be no summer camps, no barbecues, and no swim team this year; very likely no community pool at all.

We have framed the summer as a unit of time through which we will move with a certain understanding, when we will not have the structure or obligations of school but will create our own rhythms of work, play, and rest at home. If any portion of this time period–which I personally conceptualize as the entirety of calendar year 2020 because that is the only way I can adjust my expectations in a manageable way–could be said to be agreeable, it will be the summer. The loss of access to our community pool will definitely be felt keenly and deeply, as it is our family’s budget-conscious summer camp alternative and has been the place where we eat, relax, and socialize for the past decade. We will also miss the library. We miss it now; our biggest unexpected cost of this situation has been books for our child to read. (I have dozens of unread books on hand, and my partner has lost his appetite for pleasure reading after days spent interfacing with coworkers via machines.)

However, those losses will require only fairly minor changes of plans after the dramatic upheaval of going home from school and work one day and never returning. We are fortunate to have a grill, an income, and the space for a ridiculous inflatable pool that seemed a necessary investment as refuge from the incessant drone of our window a/c units once summer really gets going. Our child had already asserted they didn’t want to go to summer camp, they wanted to lounge around reading and watching TV. I had already agreed to that plan with the additions of working around the house and in the yard; I myself planned to make art and organize the basement and attic, two activities that my child was eager to add to their roster. Yes, we will miss our friends, but we hope that as the weather warms, DC truly does move over the peak, and we start to have access to antibodies tests, we will be better equipped to selectively engage with our closest friends in distanced and controlled ways.

Am I trying to brightside a global pandemic that the US continues to exacerbate into a stunning clusterfuck at all turns? Absolutely not. I am only trying to apply what I’ve been taught, to look for the ways–moments, spaces, parts of my body–in which I am okay and breathe into those. The past two weekends, we have worked on clearing weeds in the garden, dividing and moving plants, pruning and staking trees, and generally caring for the patch of earth we are privileged to occupy. I have turned my attention, however momentarily, from worry and powerlessness to identifying concrete tasks such as reseeding the bare patches in the lawn with beneficial clover and relocating the crowded shrubs so that they receive the light they need to thrive. I have allowed myself to breathe in the spring and hope for all of us to receive more of what we so desperately need this summer.

Day 31

A month, we’ve been here in the house together. All day, every day. A few times, we’ve gone for walks alone; four times, one of us has gone to the store. Otherwise, three people, one house, around the clock.

It’s a bizarre situation, to know that we are so fortunate to have a home that is spacious enough for all of us to be comfortable; to have each other to interact with; and to have our incomes be so far unaffected. I am acutely aware of how many people are sheltering alone in apartments; are continuing to be at risk in jobs they cannot do without and cannot be done from home; and how many families have each other but not the space to be out from under each others’ feet. I am actively grateful for our yard multiple time every single day; I grieve for my friends struggling to stay healthy in small, lightless spaces.

At the same time, we are challenged by the impacts of my chronic illness and inability to access my typical maintenance treatments. My fatigue ebbs and flows, even while the demands of school and cooking do not; our stable income relies on my partner being essentially unavailable for 10 hours a day, regardless of my capacity; and my pain and musculoskeletal dysfunction are increasing day by day. I still manage, but I’m starting to have persistent aches and areas of constriction that will not ease with the treatments I have available at home. I try not to worry, but it’s impossible not to wonder when I will be able to get back into care and how much I’ll be limping when I finally do.

We also have the specter of food scarcity looming. While we are all unclear on if, how, or when food shortages will start to manifest, our family’s need for a regular supply of specific allergen-free foods makes that uncertainly feel more urgent. I would like to believe that state governments will act to adapt our food systems to redirect the tons of food that are being trashed and discarded, from restaurants and institutions that are closed to the food banks and pantries that so desperately need it. At the same time, I know that if our household becomes food insecure, two out of the three of us will not be able to eat the common carbohydrates that are provided as the bulk of the sustenance. Striking a balance between mindful preparation and anxiety-driven stockpiling is nearly impossible while we can only be guided by supposition and speculation.

What we have learned in this month is that there are some ways in which our family is resourced to live this way for long periods of time, namely those aspects that touch on our physical living space and our temperamental suitability to working or learning from home and through screens. In other ways, we are watching the clock and our diminishing stores of rice and meat, despite knowing that way madness lies.

Balance. What that has meant for us is an ebb and flow of interaction with those we can’t currently sit with and share a coffee or a romp in the yard. My child exchanges video messages with their friends wherein they mostly demonstrate their prowess with the silly effects and drawing features. I have been checking in with Wallace and Jay whenever my schedule allows, for my own enjoyment in being enveloped by smart, music-loving, city dwellers as well as for my contribution to a friend’s connection to the world outside a small apartment. We’ve been donating money to food banks and migrant services, participating in phone and letter drives to urge officials to support stronger relief measures, and bartering with friends who are willing to make us masks for the low cost of our gratitude and some extra material to put towards masks for others.

As so many are now emphasizing, physical distance does not have to mean social isolation, and all that we can do to see and hold each other emotionally is support that could turn out to be life-saving. Anything we can do to contribute to ensuring that people have shelter, sustenance, and safety, we should do. In the words of the old anthem, we fight for roses too, and those roses are us and our sanity. Every day, often before I am even out of bed, I am holding you in my mind’s eye and I am thinking so vehemently, just survive.