Day 97
Once, long ago, I was in a car that ran straight into a wall at 45 miles an hour. For days, while my friends were in the hospital, then weeks while my broken arm healed, that accident was the only real thing in the world. Now it’s a quirk of history from the distant past. I hardly think about it anymore, and when I do, impossibly, it makes me smile. It’s as though the fear and the shock can’t reach me from so far in the past. Trauma’s arms just aren’t long enough.
When events of sufficient intensity come along, imagination isn’t big enough to see around them to the other side. The joy I’ve felt standing on the prow of a ferry in the Puget Sound, for example, or the pain when I had mono, and my throat was so swollen it bled and I couldn’t breathe. Like rock stars, these moments think they’re immortal. How confusing for them that after hardly any time goes by, they’re watching from their living rooms while somebody’s new song rockets up the charts.
Someday, a world full of people who lived through a long-ago Dread Virus won’t be able to remember what we called it. Coronavirus—they’ll remember that name—but there was another… “Corvid? No, that’s birds. Cupid? That’s not it either, but there was something we called it,” they’ll say. They’ll have to look it up.
Hope (and even Probability) suggests I might be one of them. If that’s true, and I manage to be around long enough that COVID-19 feels like a distant thing from a long time ago, I wonder what I’ll remember from my isolation time.
Probably I won’t remember planning meals two weeks in advance to minimize trips to the store, or the diligent hand washing, or the constant string of little risk assessments. I might remember, as information, the fact that we worked from home, that we couldn’t go see our friends and families, that we couldn’t meet for brunch or birthday dinners. I won’t remember the stress of it, or the feeling of deprivation. In fact, in the rear view mirror, I bet it will look like fun.
If I remember anything, it will be my pride in a community that went together into isolation, and flattened the curve; the awesome wonder at seeing so many people stand in the streets, declaring that justice would not wait; the anger at a Commander in Chief whose narcissism wouldn’t allow him to admit there was a crisis, even while the bell tolled a hundred thousand times and more; the frustration at those who took a mask as a sign of weakness, the virus for a ploy for political points; the deep gratitude for safety, when it finally came, and the thanks I felt for those who worked to secure it.
At the moment, though, all of that feels like fantasy. Every day the news makes time stop, just like it stopped yesterday, and the day before.
—
I had to work late this evening. I had a database to migrate after the close of business, which meant sitting out in the Emergency Command and Control Vehicle while the sky turned orange, then deepest blue. It might seem like a pain, working into the evening, but I didn’t mind. The ECCV is my place away from the world, lately.
Not my fortress of solitude, though. Did I tell you? The habitat-mate came out and met my friends there! It happened! They weren’t sure what to make of her, nor she of them, but we all sat together, talking, like people used to do in the golden days. It felt so natural, it was hours before we realized how much time we’d let slip away.
The last few days I’ve been keeping one of the benches folded down, just in case we need a bed out there. If we find ourselves awake, as we do some nights, we can sneak out there where Dread can’t find us. We’ll open the windows and let in a cool breeze. Likely as not, we can get one of our friends to sing us to sleep.
