and the beginning of week three

Now that the doors are closed to one another, I am constantly crawling out of warped reality. But these solitary weeks are only hurtles of communication. 

First things first, my dreams take a heavy load. I bristle in the night: Dreams of demons; dreams of searching; dreams of escaping; dreams of murder, also. I get lost in the sheets because their folds never end. Is this whole virus a fever dream? Why is Cuomo beginning to look like my best friend’s dad? I can’t tell whose arm is snaked around me, my partner’s, a ghost’s, or my own. Day and night weave while I fall into tears alighted on traffic circle in the rain where the gentle cherry blossoms float. Spring is in Brooklyn. 

My partner and roommate taps the top of the water bottle like he usually does to say he’s up, active, ready for the day. For what? I think snidely, we’ve been inside for so long. It could be any time of day, and on account of being quarantined I having nothing to do but refresh my news feeds, and worry about the teary eye on my cat. What started as the biggest snow day of my life, with cancelled meetings in place of luxuriating at home became monotonous and stressful while the apartment collects dust. 

In this pandemic invisible microbes choke the city down yet work slowly returns in the form of sympathetic emails, each ending with sharp deadlines. I don’t want to go back there, not like this, not in my apartment, let me stay in dreams, I think as I open the subject lines. Let me paint into my dreams, write into them like markings on walls, like mildew pressing against my toes. Give me another reason. I don’t want to do your work. I only want to live in this moment because I can’t take my eyes away from it. I can’t focus on these deadlines made before the city shut down, the greatest city, I think, the biggest city, the tightest place. Home in as much as I came here and never left. I don’t know what home means anymore, but I do know I have become very familiar with the veined wainscoting. 

Despite the breathless sick dominoing around the world, I am an introvert, this is far from killing me. I have even found time to paint. But I miss my friends, my family. I miss embracing them. I miss forays in coffee shops, or bars, or museums. Going to my writing group at the library. There may be many weeks of this, months of this. Sometimes zoom meetings don’t feel better, sink slightly after logging off. This apocalypse is old. But the sun doesn’t know it as it travels overhead.

On a walk ro break up the day my partner says “this is New York, the show will go on. When this is over, the engines will start back up again. People will move away and others will take their place, businesses we love will close, but others will come soon enough.” The capitalist wheel will continue to roll, but I don’t want it to. This makes me feel motion sickness. 

I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to and reading about ends. There are ends, just as there are beginnings, there are just not “the’s,” only ends and beginnings mingling like waves. To think about other ends helps this one. Because regardless of my partner’s words, something is ending, even if it’s only for me. There is always change. 

Things do end. 

Just like you don’t have to carry the world forever. 

Yes, in the larger scheme, things will go back to a semblance of what they were. But it matters how this time will be remembered. Which has to do with how it will be lived: more silent than before, more close to the walls and windows, re-engaging with time. Getting to know your relationship to technology and other addictions or neuroses in a different way. 

I know that when this is over I will hold my friends, I know when this is over I will embrace my parents. But I will also know how to be alone again, alone with my partner in a different way. I hope this system begins to crack and care can move into the streets, to the people. 

I try to tell myself in these waves of infection: when life feels like a dream, meet it. If these are dreams, so be it, let them be dreamt with purpose, hold it. So that it can be remembered right, so it can be respected right. I don’t care if it sounds foolish to inflect that we can learn now. This is how minds can change as they grapple to understand the moment. Each expression is an outstretched hand.