369 days
This past weekend, we hit a year of staying at home.
There was a rising spiral that whole week of March 9th, 2020. A growing fever that I refused (or wasn’t able) to process. Whispers and rumours of school closings and lockdowns getting louder.
On Tuesday, I sat in the common area at Stanley to write. Edging away from people and glancing nervously whenever someone coughed. I came home and decided to avoid the place for a bit.
On Wednesday, Tom Hanks gets it. The president appears behind the Resolute desk, pale and sweaty beneath his tangerine tint, and announces a European travel ban. It’s not like I had any plans to go home, but not being able to has me swaying on an edge, disoriented.
By Thursday, the district calls it. An extended spring break. Schools would close the next day for two weeks until this whole thing blows over.
On Friday, I’m in the car outside school, waiting for the kid to come out. The minutes tick by after the final bell and there’s no sign of her. Her number flashes up on my phone and she’s calling me in tears. I can’t do it. It’s chaos. I can’t get to my locker. Everyone is freaking out. Can I just leave my stuff? It’s only two weeks. I guess a part of me knows that’s not true because I say, no baby. Wait until it calms down and grab your textbooks. She finally makes it to the car, cheeks flushed, miserable. She breaks down into sobs. In the next year it will be the only time I see her cry over this. I’ll cry about the plague plenty. In the shower, on walks, on the phone. For the nurses, for those dying alone in a sterile hospital, for my family, out of self-pity. And we’ll have blowups. Assignments undone at ten at night, fibs discovered and tearful apologies. Unkindness from friends before they move on. But this time in the car, parked alongside the school she won’t enter again for over a year, her backpack grubby and stuffed with papers that she’s right, turns out she won’t need any of them, this will be the only time she crumbles under the weight of it.
Saturday - it’s a beautiful day and the neighbourhood kids ask if they can play. A pinging flurry on the group text. How do we feel about this? Should we let them hang out? The consensus is yes. Outside and no touching. But the cracks are starting to show. Cracks that widen and deepen and some that will never heal. The ultra cautious who will barely leave the house for a year. The ones with kids at private school whose lives barely change. The one who doesn’t wear a mask. The confused one in the middle.
Sunday morning I get into a Facetime fight with my uncle’s girlfriend. England is a week behind us and she tells me that they can’t close schools there. That kids in England need to go to school. That school is more than history and geography, it’s food and health checks and bruises from mummy’s boyfriend. I feel anger and tears rise up in my throat and I snap. It’s that stuff here too. Of course it is. This is a fucking tragedy. I tap out with the red X button.
By Monday, bars, restaurants and gyms are closed and lockdown starts in earnest.
If I had known then that this would last for 18 months, what would I have done? I’ve hopped from hopeful stepping stone to stepping stone all year, the other side of the river always spooling out a little further, never quite getting there. After spring break, by the summer, in the fall. By Christmas I’d set up camp on a smooth stone, gotten comfy, reluctant to even see the river bank anymore. This is life now, there are no “before-times”.
Exercise and walking have been my life blood. Watching the birds and the seasons change has become close to a religion. I worship at the altar of chickadee and tree bud. I’ve gotten up every day and fed the cats, made tea, tidied up, taken a shower, moved my body, loved my family. But I’ve become harder too. I wear my worry for my quiet, pale teen like a permanent shawl. My faith in humanity is shaken. There was no blitz-like spirit - only, what can I get away with. The sacrifice of the elders for beer and a shitty burger. I wished for the death of one particular old man. I’m not proud of it but I did. I saw the kids in cages and the hundreds of thousands dead and the never ending effluent stream of lies and hatred and I dove right into the hate and I wished him dead.
And now the light at the end of the tunnel grows bigger and brighter - although shadows and spectres nip at our heels. One year and four days since she last went to school, I’ll drop my kid off in the same spot I picked her up in tears all those months ago.
I feel shaky and reluctant to embrace the light. Nervous to hope when hope has been crushed so many times. I’m pulling into land after a long sea voyage - knowing that the land will roll underneath my sea legs, wondering if perhaps I might just stay on board a bit longer.
