Will there ever be a time to talk about it?

An exercise in writing around.

they say:
this is what's been important the entire time—
the only meaningful currency is human interaction.
in the end (which is the beginning),
when there's nothing else,
all we have is each other.
that's not a cutesy, feel-good idea,
but stone-cold fact.
(From March 27, 2020)

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I feel the urge to write about having lived through a pandemic that turned into an epidemic that turned into a not-story, that turned into the murky collective shrug everything becomes here. Another news cycle gone; attention flitting somewhere else. But to write this is to have to organize my thoughts around yet another historical event that has occurred within my lifetime. Disrupting the present to look back at the past. I have worked hard to get comfortable in the present.

My body remembers those quarantine days, when it initially felt novel to be at home with my literal babies; to spend days reading without feeling the guilty tug of elsewhere; the sigh of relief when we'd stumble upon wide-open space under expansive Floridian sky. In order to write that, I would have to acknowledge that, much to my chagrin, I am human like everyone else, and that something within me also broke during those days, broke in a way that could not be repaired. I would say the endless sun of spring in quarantine beamed against the cracks in my relationship and within myself, and that I could not avert my eyes, not that time.

I would want to highlight the absurdity of existing in Pandemic Time and daydreaming about languid dates in brightly-lit restaurants; how much I wondered whether I'd wasted the best years of my life; how I wondered so much whether I'd ever feel comfortable breathing the air again. I even dreamed of waiting in line at a restaurant, for the first time in my dreaming life. But to write that might signal the boring mundanity of this parent's life, and then we'd be going too deep for one writing.

I could use my words to write about masks; about how I used to double-mask; how quickly it was nothing then standard then nothing again. I could mention how, for a short while, I would mask outside even though it felt ridiculous, but then we'd have to talk about fear and confusion and migraines, and I hate talking about migraines.

I could mention how I learned the over-ear straps were too much tension for my tiny ears when worn too long or with my glasses, and I could mention how I learned to wear the glasses that didn't slip off my masked nose. But then I might have to write about the panic of not-masking that turned into anxiety that turned into being normal with an asterisk. But then I will have to write about how I learned to hide behind those masks; how I hid my skin that was a maze of hormonal breakouts and hyperpigmentation. And then I might have to mention how I didn't recognize the mask became emotional armor, as a way of being unseen in plain sight. Then I would have to say this is another thing I now must unlearn.

I’d probably have to acknowledge how much I began to miss human interaction, and also how fearful of it I’d become, and I wouldn't want to say that because it would make me sound like an old lady. Then I might even have to think about feeling old and washed up. And thinking about that would extend into writing hard truths about relationships with friends when paths begin to diverge. And then I would probably mention a lover; the ways I need a lover’s hand, his glance, his mouth, his surety to remind me of the brilliance of being alive in this body. To write about that is to have to write about the shame of wanting at all, of wanting it all.

To write about the pandemic is to have to go deep into the well of longing; to parse emotions that haven't yet settled. To write about it is to look plainly.

I need some more time.