It's been four days after four months. The new reality to which to you all accumulated gradually, I'm experience all at once. The absence of traffic in the street. The closed and often boarded up stores. The lack of supermarket selection. The socially distanced lines that go around the block. The get togethers at which people can only talk loud to be heard over the social distance and the masks; the masks, the masks, the omnipresent masks. And even worse, the surreality of people who don't wear masks and the implicit gulf between them and us, is it just a disagreement, or is it a war we're in denial that we're waging?
When I left, we all were yelling at each other over this or that Presidential candidate, the Green New Deal, the trivial outrages of a Trump Presidency that still seemed to me like a disaster no different than every other Republican disaster, everybody else seemed to think it unprecedented. But now, we all know what unprecedented truly feels like, and it's everything we feared it would be - the presence of death staring down us all everywhere, everywhen. We all try to experience normal life as we can, lest the oppressive surreality drive us truly insane, but we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and we most definitely fear evil. Is this what it felt like in the Warsaw Ghetto? Is this what Leningrad felt like in the early days of the siege? The Blitz? The Vichy occupation? Guernica or Lidice or Tokyo or Dresden right before the bombs? Bransk and Wissocky before their liquidation? Or is this just the hyperdrama of a mind that refuses to accept that an illness will pass over those of us who stay careful?
For the first time in nearly half a year, I saw my whole immediate family on Tuesday for a socially distanced cookout, masks and all. Brothers and sister-in-law, parents, Bubbie, except for a couple masks and mostly maintaining strict distance, it was little different than it's been at so many lunches and dinners over the last ten years at my parents kitchen table. But of course, the one who covertly did the worst job at maintaining the distance was me. Sneaking up and handling my parents utensils when my stomach ordered me not to wait for people to stop eating before I took seconds. My parents packed brownies and offered me some, and like an idiot, I said no, thinking I've already had my fill of ice cream this year, and then sneaking a couple brownies from both my brothers' stashes.
Otherwise, the same jokes, the same subjects (Trump), and grateful to finally be around people you love and love you, and just grateful to be around anyone at all after four months pretty much without the presence of a single other person. And yet when you go home you inevitably begin to wonder, how many of these gatherings might be left? Or at least I do... You start ranking family in order of importance of who's expendable. Obviously Jordan and Naomi need to stick around, Ethan too, and Mom deserves to be around more than I do, and she's certainly of more use. But Dad and Bubbie can obviously go before I do,... so that makes me #3 on the expendable list, and if any of the others go before me I'll have to be stopped multiple times from joining them, especially Mom.
Mom begins to start reminding me of things I have to do, with occasional assides of 'Dad and I won't be around forever' to up the urgency. A boy's best friend is his mother, and you begin to realize how ill-equipped you are to face life without your best friend, and even if there's no reason to worry, you start to worry all the same that you'll have to say goodbye long before you're ready, and not even in person.
None of us knows what comes next. At this point, we all know people who've come down with it, multiple people with scares, and we're all within two degrees of the lost. And when this plague is over, what then? More diseases? War? A crumbling planet? All of it all at once?
All my life I've dreamed of the ability to leave Baltimore, but realistically it would have been the most imprudent thing in the world, even ten years in DC was wreckless - organizational disaster after disaster, financial, professional, even social. And now, the old cliche has become true - when the pressure is on, all you want is for everything to remain the same forever: no danger, no loss, the unbreakable structures you bristled against to hold firm.
Please oh please god, if it's any of us, let it be me.
No comments:
Post a Comment