Together

“Only go to the ER if you can’t finish a sentence, it’s a 30 plus hour wait.”
 

Sirens. Sweat. Fear. Chills. Oximeters. Cuomo press conferences, prayer, ringing my meditation bell nightly at 7pm - to honks, hoots, hollers & ladles...hard-hit against iron pans.

Ouch.

But it feels good to come together at this one moment - briefly & safely in something shared by ears.

The child upstairs unearths what sounds like a wooden flute on Day 5. It competes against the adult clanking, piercing it with a more lofty, soft & hollow note.

She sounds directly above, hanging out the window as far as mom thinks she can safely
stretch...blowing hope at ‘us’ - the neighbors, the hood, the situation gone amuck....The adults who got us into something larger than a mess. Not sure if blame is productive, but it is there. Tweeted in lieu of press conferences.

It is ‘the other’s’ fault - the fault of those who birthed ‘Kung Flu’. A place very far away that is brought closer with lots of steel burning fuel. Those rich enough to fly distribute the pathogens freely.

We (including me) can’t deny our link. It spreads freely between cultures, races, ethnicities, religions & those with different amounts of digits in their paycheck. Some have so many more zeros.

But then why does something so dispersed - yet shared - tear us apart,...When, it is actually the thing that binds us?

Together, stitched tightly like a quilt with little squares of fabric so clashingly different from the neighbor beside.

But we are all there - threaded with a single strand of something that brings us eerily
together...in drive-through swabbing booths, waiting in long parking lot lines to get a swab up the nose towards the brain. Not sure of the anatomy of how it gets there, but it goes deep to a place it seems it shouldn’t.

And there it probes looking for something we all wish it wouldn’t find.

But whether we get that dreaded call or not, we all are threatened and mourning the passing of lives lost. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, Friend, Mentor, or ‘that nice lady in 6C’. Their lives, our lives.

Mourning the feel of a hug or an intimate conversation with a friend outside our ‘pod’ that really needs to be had closer than six feet.

Mourning casual chit-chat while waiting in line for a cup of something satisfying, elbows away from a random person-turned-friend who makes us feel strangely happy and connected to our ‘hood....

...A neighbor who makes us smile as a result of a casual exchange that would now be
considered life-threatening.

So we retreat to our pods, to our homes-turned-cells, broadcasting loved ones and colleagues we miss in conversations on a grid.

But there is no opportunity to casually share silence. Lips move and engagement is on
overdrive. I wish I could just press ‘pause’ to savor a precious, simple moment and save it
somewhere easy for repeated play.

We wear the likes of a hazmat suit to run to the store to get that missing recipe ingredient that has become mission-critical to getting through the day. Chocolate chips or bust.
And then, when it gets dark, and it is time to sleep, things almost seem normal after ear plugs soften the sirens.

That’s when I hear myself breathe better and am grateful for healing. Grateful for the closeness of my favorite blanket embracing my body, cradling me with the warm banter of a stranger in a long line of people - pressing close in happy anticipation of getting their morning beverage. Together on screens & and in lines with masked faces, we’ll get through this.

Together.

Pressing ‘pause’ for the first smile we see after sudsing-up & singing ‘happy birthday’ twice.