Hello, Universe

I am gathering items for a birthday party to be: cans of silly string in bulk, balloons, water balloons, squirt guns, banners, floats. Come Saturday, I will just add pizza and cake. 

Anyway, I feel like the Berenstain Bears, in “The Berenstain Bears and TOO MUCH BIRTHDAY,” when they’re getting ready for Sister’s party, and it’s still exciting and they haven’t gone too far yet—ie: before the ponies. 

And anyway, I’m thinking about how they use a spare room in the treehouse to hoard all the supplies. And how I loved this part as a child. The amassing of a bunch of pieces, stacked up and colorful and promising. Like the birthday presents themselves. Shiny and lovely and hopeful—a sort of soft, consoling abundance.

Those books are something like comfort food to me—that slow baked cadence, the way they were so thorough, even in their explanations to their cubs. Especially in their explanations to their cubs. And something about being able to hide between those wordy spaces as a kid, for the assurance of grown up bears and their certainty, and for the story to take too long when I was supposed to be going to bed. 

It was the same with Frances, how she lists what she grew to have in her eventual lunchbox, once she’d conquered just bread and jam. I could read that part a million times to myself before bed. Cardboard salt and pepper shakers. A bud vase of flowers! A doily for the desk. The tidiness of salad sandwiches, cut, and tucked into containers. Recordings of the ephemeral; a calmness in the details. Satisfaction in the things, nouns listed like a meditation—and I see that this type of efficiency may have just been a way to quell an ever present thrum of undiagnosed childhood anxiety. 

***

What is strange is how my dad came home from the hospital a couple of weeks ago with a lingering delirium that made him list his meals in the same way—and how it didn’t feel the same. No comfort there. I would listen to the halting catalog of his menus while tears rolled down my cheeks. 

This was not my dad. He was prone to speaking lengthily about anything—having kissed the blarney stone being a great point of pride for him. But this dude was not MY Dude. There was no levity in the lengthy details, he spoke too slowly. There was no laughter behind the invented fact, the words together became inert.

But. I wonder how my mom felt about the thrice daily tea parties—if she liked it. She was always fond of miniatures. Little pitchers and little silverware. China saucers and jelly jars. Our sandwiches cut into triangles and served on oblong glass plates that had indents for your teacup. Sometimes she would make me tea, adding tap water if it was too hot, and I would dunk my tea bag while I told her about kindergarten that day. I remember two things about kindergarten. The Columbus song that I can still sing. And how, when I got glasses, a girl at school told me I was ugly. 

(Ugly. Even the word is cruel.)

But my mom, on those afternoons. Here is what I see. She was tiny. High waisted bell bottoms, a soft plaid button up shirt tucked into the belt tightly, so trim. Or a light sweater that came to her neck. I’d eat at the counter and she would wander over to watch “All My Children” with a mug. She would let us watch it with her; I would always wander away. Always in favor of books. Longing for my bed, for a tidier story.

***

When she bought us books, my mom would have us write our names in the front of them, on the first page: name and date, the ownership laid in artful scrawl, the artfulness in direct proportion to my current age. Scratchy when little; controlled cursive by third grade; affectedly angsty and sparse by high school. The book was mine, a minute of my time, frozen in history. 

To be clear, at least 90% of what I read as a child I never actually owned, the library and the Bookmobile like houses of worship, quiet and cold and smelling like age. I would take a tote bag with me and I would fill it. I devoured entire series over and over from these shelves: Sweet Valley, and Anne of Green Gables and Little House and Nancy Drew, and Ramona and all the Judy Blume the world had to offer. A dip into Madeline L’engle and C.S. Lewis and Lois Lowry because the grown-ups would suggest it. But I was fickle and girlish, prone to wild notions. So between “Tiger Eyes” and “Forever”—the books we passed under the tables of my seventh grade honors English class with sex scenes marked and dog eared—somehow I’m convinced that I really made the most of my public school education and California’s tax payer dollars. 

***

One of my best memories as a child, I am probably about 11. We drove into the city specifically so that I could complete my collection of “The Babysitters Club” series. We were at a bookshop I’ve never been able to find again. And I want to say it was off Union Square because I’m remembering it in relation to the Hello Kitty store, somewhere; and I want to know if I still have that complete collection, also somewhere. 

Here it occurs to me that perhaps books, and the characters inside of them, are my friends. Maybe they’re the only true friends that there really are; the only things that stay the same. They never leave. You know exactly where to find them, tucked between soft covers, just waiting for you patient and unchanging.

It also occurs to me that my daughter’s love of reading came soaring out during quarantine. She was our most social creature, she has been the slowest to join in on making plans with friends again. 

***

I still love opening books from my shelf and seeing the ballpoint date in my mom’s swooping pen—generally sometime amid the 1970’s—or written in my own changing hand in the 80’s and 90’s. I wonder when I stopped doing this. I wish now that I had kept the tradition going—and that I had written more underneath my name and date. Like what I was thinking, or who I was with, or what country I bought it in. Basically: more words. Words upon words. Already enough words and always adding to it. 

I have a copy of “Jazz” by Toni Morrison that is tiny and royal blue and a European imprint. The penmanship of my hand drew my name so little and tight in the top right corner of the  title page, no caps. Seeing it, I am drawn into the particulars: of the girl I was who wrote in that taut curve, who was secretive with her words in a notebook. I was a newlywed and the thing I feared most was that he would try to read my journals. He would press on what I was writing, and I would be defensive. I kept the notebook, and the book, together—shoved into the bottom of a backpack that I carried for two months, stashed above me on a train, across country lines and mountain ranges. 

Also: I only wrote my first name in that book. I couldn’t bring myself to include with it my new last name. 

Sometimes it’s the words we leave out.

(In editing, they write dele: a truncation of a thing to erase. An extra two letters too much; delete the delete, disappearing even as its written.)

***

I think now that I stopped writing my name in books during college because all I did was write in books. I have so many now that I try to reread and they are underlined to the point of obsolescence—where the more interesting feels like whatever is not underlined—and all the markings feel pretentious. Was I always trying so hard? Was I always seeking something between the lines? 

I think I was. 

Sometimes the stories we’re supposed to get from the words are just as important as the stories on the margins. Fantasy fills in the blanks; hope does too. Imagination is all the ink in the world, coloring inside the lines and out. And what was I supposed to take from all of it? Well, I got to choose.

***

As a child, getting to use a pen to write your name in a book felt a little bit naughty, like something you really shouldn’t do, like the breaking of some reiterated rule of elementary school and number 2 pencils. 

On an unofficial scale of scandal that I’m inventing as this sentence appears before me, it’s almost as scandalous as writing your heights in Sharpie on the wall. A act, I have to say, I didn’t realize was scandalous until a little girl came over to play and gaped at the ramshackle scribbled ruler of heights and names and dates and ages. “My mom would NEVER let us write on the wall,” she said and I countered, “This isn’t really WRITING on the wall.” But she just stared at me, unconvinced of this mothering left unchecked, and I hoped she didn’t go upstairs where the bedroom walls really were written on, willy nilly, messy and, to me, expressions of place.

(Isn’t this all of our home? Don’t we all live here? How is the ink and the paint on the wall done by the hand of children any less needful than the Paul Klee? Than the family photo?)

In the backyard, this claim is evident: where a sidewalk chalk mishap at least eight years prior baked our youngest child’s name into the stucco on the back of our house. It’s gigantic lettering; it will be a cave painting for the ages. That he lived here. That he existed.

I have a memory fall into me suddenly as I write this—something I haven’t thought of in ages. When I was a teenager I dated a guy who was a tagger. He would find surfaces, overpasses, abandoned buildings, empty walls, and fill them with words, gigantic lettering, three dimensional and colorful. One time he wrote my name. All bubbled and like it was exploding. B-R-O-O-K-E. I can still see it, exploding in my mind.

Now, the thought of it makes my own name explode in my throat. A fullness I catch and can’t swallow.

***

Tagger was the least of his disobedience to civility and rules, and though he wasn’t my first, he was older, and taught me a lot about my own body. He would peel my shirt off of me anywhere that we were after dark, a cement picnic table at the park or in his car, and I remember distinctly, looking down at myself and seeing my bra gleaming in the dim, and how my skin looked blue in the moonlight.

Sometimes he would just stare at me. He saw me at a party and then sought me out, finding me at my job in the mall. He was relentless, he called me as soon as I got home. He said to me, “You have the most interesting look.” As though I could help it. It was just my face, my body, my skin, my hair, the way these cells came together.

And honestly? These words stuck, from men, and I’m never entirely sure if they were compliments or accusations.

***

I want so badly to be witnessed, but I don’t know how to let people see me, and what I want is to be seen, out in the open, lying there plain and broken and whole and disparate and complete. Exploding and okay with it. The only problem is that everything changes; I change. Maybe writing things down is a way of making something that is fleeting stay still for just one minute. That my mind will change, that my thoughts will change, that everything will change means nothing, not really. It is mainly about witnessing it at the moment, like the heights on the wall—each child has dozens of markings and a date. They don’t stay static at three feet high—it only marks where they were, once. And that they grew. 

Could you see me like this? All my heights? All my selves? Every word? Can you take me in, in entirety? Find me like this: unembarrassed, unashamed.

***

I read in the Sunday paper one morning, a light letter in the TV section, the critic writes back to a girl who can’t get over “Normal People.” And neither can I, frankly. Just. All of it—the novel first, and Sally Rooney as a writer second, and the cinematic scope of Ireland in the show, and the spare way it all handles itself.

And, anyway, she writes this to describe a character:

“…that artsy impatience of people who spent a lot of time reading alone as children,”

And I think, Huh. 

And I think: How strange that I just had my entire sensibility reduced down to the fractured second half of a sentence. Literally the aside of an answer, a prelude to the actual thought, a diagnosis that took very few words at all.

***

My daughter is next to me reading a book called, “Hello Universe.” It’s been in her bookcase for a while. It looks a little young for her. “I can’t remember if we bought it in Santa Cruz or Denver,” she muses on two bookshops that we love, lying on her tummy, looking over the top of the hardbound cover, at the trees. Her feet are crossed and by the kitty, who bats at her toes lovingly then forgets what she’s doing to lick her own paw. 

I think: Here’s an argument for writing an establishing paragraph in the front cover of your books—if it was Santa Cruz, it was that rainy afternoon near the holidays, and we met the Grinch and took a stroll to Pizza My Heart afterwards; if it was Denver, we chose it after you tried a cappuccino for the first time and hated it, then we ate breakfast at lunchtime, and kept singing, “Build me up, buttercup baby, just to let me down.” 

Wouldn’t these details be nice to know? 

My daughter says, “I like this book because this concept: It says that when you get a good feeling or a bad feeling, it’s the universe telling you something.” 

Well.

I have a good feeling and a bad feeling.

(What is it, Universe? Lay it on thick and spare me no details. Use color. Use pen. Scratch it all out.)

***

My laptop is open in front of me, we are still in the nook outside. He wanders over from across the yard to see what I am searching. “Pool toys.” He approves.

We discuss his impending birthday party—the exact slip n slide that I bought. The color of streamers. Ideas for a cake. God bless the scrappiness of this child that wants to make it and decorate it himself… “Orrrr,” he muses, “Just buy it at a bakery.” Then we decide where we will sit while he opens his presents. “I don’t know why,” he says, staring at the sky, the leaves of the trees that seem to captivate us all, sending our vision upwards, “Birthdays are just a really big deal to me.”

***

Once upon a time, someone told me that their mom forgot their birthday. This thought suddenly pinches my heart. These feelings aren’t mine to keep, but. I plan my son’s birthday party thinking of that, with a little bit of ache. For all the little accidental ways we hurt each other, even our kids, even ourselves, even each other.

Eye Contact

I fell asleep on my stomach, in a patch of sunshine created between the shadows of two soaring elms. I was reading a novel, out in the back on the grass, and looking at old texts. They made me laugh, one about a dirty sock, and I thought of that night in May, when you reached over to take my hand while we walked along the Chicago river. I remember how the streetlights looked on the surface of the water, glistening in broken pieces, and the laughter from the wine bar we passed, and the way my feet felt in woven flats. 

The nap on my tummy was dreamless and black. I woke with a start and I’m not sure why. I couldn’t hear splashing in the water across the lawn, and I couldn’t find my little boy’s head. A shot of fear jolted me upright. But the rope where he launched from still swung from its perch, swaying in the air softly, next to the dog who didn’t move and only looked at me, when I looked that way. 

I found his head soon enough, bobbing in the crystal blue. He’s alone in this round monstrosity of a pool, this backyard pond we erected with plastic pieces and hose water and an instruction book as thick as my first knuckle. He’s turning ten this summer and he’s begged for months for a pool. It keeps him occupied in the most consuming sense and he is constantly busy with it. Ladders and ropes and pool noodles and toys. He wanted a watermelon floatie and seeing how big it was once he unboxed it, he abandoned it. Too impatient to inflate it with his own little lungs, he left it there for me and you to deal with. When I wake to it (that perfect plastic circle), I’m too impatient too—I leave it be; I leave it for you to tend to and finish up—for you to make better. Fix it; make it; fill it up. But you are asleep too. Your hat is covering your face and I feel, keenly, the weight of you next to me, the energy of your sun-warmed skin. 

Did we get more gorgeous in quarantine? You are tan and lean and your hair is wild and blond and brown and gray, and all along your face—bangs, sideburns, stubble. Your eyes burn blue. I only got older, a little more wrinkled, skinnier without muscle. My hair is long and flat and dark. Listless and heavy. But something changed in my eyes, and maybe that’s what you see, when you’re looking so closely in the mornings, when I roll over and hover above you and you place your left hand on my right cheek and say, “You are so beautiful.” I do look different somehow. 

I read an essay on my phone, before I fell asleep. Before the book and after the old memories that got me thinking, and it was about an aquarium and the creatures that swim behind glass. What do those fish and invertebrates see? Are we only visiting images, warped on the other side of the glass? A disconnect of misunderstanding perplexed by what is seen? A gaping sense between species?

(Will any of us ever understand each other at all?)

She said to me the other day, my fourteen year old: “Mom,” do you ever look at yourself in the mirror like this?” Then she stares at her reflection close, so that her nose is almost touching the mirror, and she moves her head slowly from side to side, not breaking eye contact with herself. It’s so specific a thing, and so general. The reckoning of self in the mirror, and yes, I’ve done it too. When I was a girl her age, I would think, “Is that really me?” a strange enmeshment between body and spirit—outsides and insides—and the lasting question: do they match?  

And then he, the pool-obsessed almost-ten-year-old boy, says: “The dog’s eyes lead her direction.” He wants me to look at the dog and I do. She is a recently shaved Golden Retriever and she’s so old and white that she looks like the newly shorn sheep we passed while driving through the countryside near Laketown. But goodness, he’s right somehow. The dog’s eyebrows arch one way and her eyes follow, and then her head follows. Her gaze is her compass. She wants water and first she arches that way, then looks that way, then rises to drink. She wants to go outside, same thing. 

Really, she’s a dumb old dog full of insecurity and unknowing. The kids love her. When they touch her, she lifts her chin, she seems to calm. Her carriage rises and her gaze feels wise. And I wonder and recount if she is dumb and insecure or just a really great actress. 

That moment when I woke from my nap, my open book by my face, pages dancing in the wind, when my son was invisible to me, the dog wasn’t paying attention either. (Or was she?) She was lying in her own spot of sunshine on the grass, a quarter acre from me. When I woke from my nap and saw her, she lifted her head to me. And what I cannot be sure of but am sure of is that she first lifted her eyebrows, then her eyes, and then her head. Across the distance, we made eye contact. She was completely still. What did she know before I saw my son? What did she see? Was she telegraphing something to me? 

Maybe. Maybe this: 

He’s okay. We’re all okay. 

Of Bone and Memory

Every day I check on the progress of the decomposing deer skeleton that has washed ashore just down the beach. Tufts of fur cling to parts of the hind leg near the sharp onyx hoof, but it’s mostly bone that is exposed. The lower jaw is lined in teeth so infinitesimal they seem no more than the plastic tines on a Barbie hairbrush. The skull sprouts two devil-like protrusions that intimate the promise of antlers. The neck and head are still cloaked in plucked pale skin that is water-logged and stretched out. 

It’s too wet for the body to dry out and break down fully, and it lives this part of its death in a slow-motion process that teases my patience, my morbid fascination. I go to gape. I go for curiosity. I go for respect. I go to test my courage to drag it out of the water and help its slow walk to decomposition, but I’m too timid to touch one of its ribs, or heaven forbid one of its heartier legs. Which I see today are unbroken and slim, but mostly detached at the upper joints as though they might float away from the body. It is the literal description of the word “disembodied” and not just the way I sometimes feel. Or is the word to describe it “dismembered”? And if that is the right word, maybe I sometimes feel that way too—like I’m no longer a part of the whole, no more a member. I take a stick from nearby and try to prod the skeleton but the stick is as sodden as the rest of the beach and it bends against the slightest pressure, those waxy ribs like a cage still stronger than the elements that surround it. 

I think that this skeleton needs a heat wave, a vast desert of arid heat. I think it needs to be sun bleached, exposed to elements that will make it crack apart, that will make its skull an ivory relic. But here, on this sandy shore, this arrangement of sinew and bone is tucked in for sleep by every wave that rolls over it like a soft blanket swaddling. It is tucked in for a long slumber, and tucked into a time warp. 

Me too. I feel tucked into a time warp. My mind bends around memory the same way it stays present. Which mainly means it all feels jumbled. I confuse my childhood with my children’s; I confuse my motherhood with my mom’s.

I remember when I was a little girl, and the first time my mom tucked me into bed by billowing my blankets out above me and letting them parachute down on me. It was the most exciting of feelings: a tiny thrill of expectation, the slight shivers, the sudden softness. The feeling of something so familiar experienced in a different way (wild, and bending and unmade) made me consider everything anew. I knew exactly how tight tucked-in covers felt, and now here they were—cool and rumpled and delicious on top of me—and I realized I didn’t know anything at all. 

I report back to the uninterested after every walk. I tell them about the body at the shore. The current state of its decay. I confess my impatience at it. I confess that it’s because I want part of the skeleton, because I want the skull. Because I imagine it a durable trophy from this time, something I’ll never forget; because I want to be like Georgia O’Keeffe—some thoughtful enthusiastic who contemplates transience artistically, someone who finds meaning in bone.

But just admitting the desire to maim and own feels violent, so when he offers to tear the skull off the body for me I touch his arm to pull him back, even though he has made no actual movements toward the offense of this thing that lies helpless. There is no life there, not anymore—and that is why, somehow, in slow death, life hovers over the body like a sacred memory. 

It’s the holiness of that that prevents me from the desecrated deed. I offer my patience like an unspoken prayer to the filaments of time, an act of obeisance toward the slow crawl of nature. I remember how to bow my head. But this feels different. Sturdier somehow; unveiled, and raw.

I’m quelled by that. I figure that if I was supposed to have the skull, I would have happened upon this skeleton in a different form. Fragmented already, and done, and clean from the elements of its life-giving parts. For a few days, I get distracted from the want. I read and read, sometimes out loud to the kids—those Newbery novels that tug at your heart and seem to always be about animals—and poetry and essays for me. And with everyone else I love, there are Marco Polos and Zooms and FaceTime: faces on screens (and I’m delighted and can’t stop smiling), but nothing to touch. My mom texts me pictures: a black and white one of Joan Didion smoking a cigarette when she is young, thick beads snaking around her neck and down her baggy pale shirt; then a picture of a recipe for lemon bread; then pictures of her (my mom’s, not Joan’s) garden too, in color—the blooming orange orchids, and something else that is profuse and purple.

I am thrown by the simplicity of this—by the way a blossom makes a stem arc, by what must be almost imperceptible (non)heft, and by the beauty of it all. 

One late morning, I finish a long walk from a shuttered town three miles away to the deer’s resting spot along the shore. It has taken me a while to get there—here—and I feel late for no reason at all. As I approach, the sun hides itself and the clouds release a shower along the shore. It feels almost warm out, and then suddenly the sky is weeping. No matter. The deer skeleton still stands whole. I breathe in the smell of rain on rocks.

A Collection of Tears

The 14-year-old said to the 19-year-old, “What if there were teacup koalas?” And at just the thought of it, the 19-year-old’s eyes brimmed with tears. They were tears for the hitherto unimagined mixture of cuteness, and the sudden desire for, and the total non-existence of the species in equal proportion. And tears because she wanted to hold a tiny koala up next to her cheek so badly; tears because she never could. 

Then she said this actual sentence: “Teacup Koalas love to hug. Because koalas hug their branches.” I looked straight into her eyes that glistened with tears of longing and sparkled with her unbridled imagination. I was so delighted by this conversation that engagement was a must. “Do you mean that they hug their branches so that they don’t fall off the trees?”

But she was undeterred. This one fights me. She jutted her lip, she deadpanned: 

“No, because they like to hug.” Then in the natural parlance of teenage frustration: “MOM.” 

***

The doorbell rings again and it’s always UPS. These days I have the perfect blip of hesitation down, a timing to where the delivery guy is almost back at his truck but not quite, and then I unfurl the door wide to grab my package. I let the 30 degree wind rush over my pajamas and cleanse me. And I yell to him “Thank you!” with a big smile and a big wave and… an unexpected assembly of tears in my eyes. One tear from the cold, one from my heart, and one for the look he gives me back, when I call out to him. He turns and pauses, his smile is so genuine, his “You’re welcome” full of warmth.

We are starved for human interaction. For the niceties within those pauses, those smiles. We are also just nicer. 

 ***

When that 19-year-old was a little girl she would say the word “grave” for “brave.” And she would use it with the most intent self-confidence and solemnity that I could only agree, “Yes, I will be grave,” instead of ever correcting her. I loved it so much. 

(She also said “grecording” for “recording” but that was later, and due to some seriously invasive orthodontia, and so hilarious that it still makes us laugh.) 

One time, as a toddler, walking in new flip-flops (and I’m going to venture out and say that they were her very first flip flops because I remember the way she determinedly clasped her toes to the plastic strap to balance), she was moving like a geisha. Tiny steps in a slow trickle of water in the gutter in front of our bungalow on Emerson. It was another summer afternoon that went on forever, and another summer sundress, and another beautiful vignette of motherhood and our life, in the towering shade of an oak tree so colossal that its roots upset the sidewalk. 

Her mouth was pursed in concentration, tight like a new red bud, and it was such frivolity met with such serious expectation of herself that I could only encourage with a slow walk beside her, in flip flops of my own, and a grave (the real kind of grave) nodding of my head if she looked up for help. 

“Are you proud of me for being grave?” She asked. 

I was. 

***

This happens every time we are stuck in the house together with stretches of nothing to do: a poem is procured and after it’s memorized, a cash prize is given. And by “a” poem, I mean one specific poem, and it’s my husband’s favorite. The kids try; they sometimes succeed. But for the easily frustrated it will lead to crying, this part is preordained. 

The nine-year-old is by me, trying to learn the stanzas even as I wish he would learn a different poem (Something more pure! Something less credo!), but he’s really going for it. I follow along with the words behind him and while I sit and listen, I affect an act of his, which is strange and unprecedented: I throw, over and over, his football into the air above me, bobbling the ball but catching it. I am listening; I am throwing; I’m rewriting thoughts in my mind and thinking of Ada Limon instead of Rudyard Kipling. 

IF. (Oh, if.)

Suddenly, my little guy grabs the football mid-air and brings it to his chest, crashing into me while tears begin to fall. His head burrows into my belly. He cries all over my hands. They are literally wet with his tears.

He’s crying because he can’t remember the words and he thinks his 16-year-old brother is laughing at him. He isn’t. 

16-year-old insists: “I am impressed. I’ll never even try that. I hate memorizing.” 

I agree with the 16-year-old. I too hate memorizing. Moreover, something inside of me rebuffs internally at the very idea of pressing anything so permanently on me. Give me wishy-washy, give me impermanence, give me the glory of the metaphor, the adjective of the second.

Anyway. He’s crying probably/mostly because sometimes you just need to cry. Especially right now.

It’s ok. I want to tell him: Be grave and cry. But I don’t say anything at all. I just touch the top of his head over and over. I bless him with his own tears, still hot in my palms. 

***

Let’s go back to the pajamas I wear onto the porch and sometimes all day. They are vintage April Cornell, so, you know… really sweet. A white Swiss dot with puff sleeves and gentle pleats and four dainty buttons lined up along the front placket. At this point of sequestered aloneness, my husband finds them sexy because they are slightly sheer. I find them appropriate because I feel like they are from another time, a time of wholesome basics, when we were pioneers who kept the home fires burning by churning butter and raking chalk on slates and this innocence suits me somehow—a little Brooke on the Prairie.

My bravery has been both bold and small, and it is discovered, often, in the very doing of the very next thing in front of me, simple as it may be. I “do” when I feel out of control. And sometimes when I stop, the sudden inaction almost makes me cry, tears gathering in the corners uninvited. Again. “Why are you all here?” is what I think, “I am fine.” But I know what it is—it’s the stillness of all of this, the sitting with it.   

If only it would all go away; if only; if if if…

In the meantime, we gather our courage in these moments of tears, we are brave. 

And… 

Think about Teacup Koalas. 

CUZ TEACUP KOALAS.

Happy

“I’m happy,” he said. He feels peaceful, his whole body calm and sinking into me, both of us sinking into the chair. He becomes a totem for me, a quiet sacred object around which I circulate what I still know for sure. I can still care for him; he still comes with a schedule and boxes to check, his needs are still assuaged by morning hugs and daily chats and whatever I can fix him in the toaster and deliver to the couch. 

I remember this time once, my brother and I floating down the Colorado in an inflatable canoe. We were in college and idiots, not wearing life jackets. Sudden rapids over-turned our entire two person apparatus of tanned limbs and unused paddles, and we were plunged into roiling depths. Immediately my leg was tangled up in a rope attached to the canoe and though upside-down, I remained close enough to the surface that once I was able to orient myself, I simply grabbed the side of the boat and floated through the rest of the rapids, catching my breath and spitting water and the ends of my hair out of my mouth. 

My brother, bound in muscles and youth and thrown completely outside of the boat, was left to fend for himself in the angry water. And he struggled. I learned this later, when he admitted it with shining eyes, that he truly thought he was going to drown. He also told me that he thought I was already dead.

How tenuous, that filament between life and death. Where once we were breathing and then suddenly we aren’t. And how strange this courage—his courage—in the face of such fear. 

A couple of weeks ago, when Covid-19 got real, we couldn’t imagine what it looked like. We laughed still because we didn’t know how to process what was happening. Incredulous could be the word. Or shock. That feeling in the body that registers as laughter but might be crying without tears. An absurdist sort of humor. I remember a simple 14 days ago, still joking about the toilet paper apocalypse, and lying with friends on a couch built for 20 (there was space!), and drinking pisco sours. We figured we were “social distancing,” that our simple group of seven was still safe, unable to fathom how surreal our world would look 48 hours later. 

And now? It’s the feeling of impending doom that gets me. It’s that fear in the face of a wall of white water. It’s the courage in defiance of that possible drowning. It’s that we still can’t register that we are dangers to each other, that we can’t see people, that anything we touch or breathe could be an enemy. 

It’s that we have to stare straight into this truth: that many among us have no food and income to sustain this pandemic. It’s that the devastation of those lives feels immediately  different than the devastation of ours, and that though “pain is pain,” and none of us will make it out of this pandemic unscathed, I am already overly-anxious at the depth of those battle wounds. Some will just scar over, silver smooth on the skin, and some will kill—a slow bleed, a slow asphyxiation, no quick fixes, no band-aids or ventilators.

It’s the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of going crazy. It’s the wondering about how this will all look if it ever goes away, and: will it ever go away?

So when he says, “I’m happy,” with the plainness of truth, I am struck. His eyes are so innocent and earnest, his body like a blanket over me, heavy with ease and relaxation, and a belly that is rounder since he’s been home all day with food that he likes and no soccer games at recess. 

Then he says, “I just like you here.” 

I try to talk it through with him. I ask, “Is it different when I’m not here?” He says no. He reiterates: “I just like it when you’re here.” 

I’ve started working again, in my own way. Part of this means I leave to write. It is the only way. I can be half productive at home, or I can leave sometimes and allow my body to settle into the rhythm of words: reading, rereading, the poetry of journaling. Song lyrics, and music itself, and groups of writers around a warm yellow table, and the din of coffee shops, and the silence of blank desks, and books upon books of writers who inspire me. 

I love being home. But home is also a different sort of workspace.

During self-quarantine, the guest bedroom has become a respite for whoever needs some alone time plus a change of scenery. It’s in a state of flux and a bit cluttered, but the bed is new and the bedding feels slippery and cool. I am in there on Sunday evening, trying with no luck to make my way through a series with subtitles. My little guy sidles up next to me, having left me alone for a delicious hour of separation and Italian dialogue and the window open and the glow of bedside lamps on. “Are you writing?” he asks. “I’m not.” “But you’re alone in here,” his eyes are wide, “Why aren’t you writing? You could just write here.” 

“I could!” I say, as though I’ve never thought of that. As though it never occurred to me that I could try to feel free in a neutral space in a big space called home. That I wouldn’t need to leave to a separate building in a separate city to find that real space to breathe big gulps of life after what sometimes feels like a trip to the bottom of the river, what feels like drowning. I just lost myself a little; it was my own fault. Writing alone has become the tether wound around my leg, the thing that will save me. 

“Can I sleep here with you?” He’s on to his next line of questioning.

“I wasn’t going to sleep here,” I respond. 

“Aww.” He’s genuine, “but I really wanted to sleep with you.”

So we sleep together, a slumber party in our own house. His head warm and sweaty against me all night because we are perpendicular instead of parallel, and my body is pushed to the very edge of the mattress. 

I will always stay on this edge, just about to fall off, just about to go under, just to give him room, just to make sure he’s happy. But sometimes, I will make us both sleep alone. 

Day 1, Week 2

I wake early enough that the birdsong is still soft and the light outside feels flat. Gray. I hear kids already playing out there, toddlers probably. Those little ones across the street who go to bed when it’s still light out and, these days, wake in the dark. 

The anxiety in my chest feels a little worse than usual this morning, the reality of this new world setting in. I feel like I had a terrible dream, and it lingers in an incessant noise that I can’t understand. It’s coming from the window. Probably from the toddlers’ house across the street. They have a pony in their backyard. An actual pony. My kids told me this and I didn’t believe them. But it’s true. A pony lives across the street. It’s miniature and strange. All of it. 

Anyway.  I feel like I’m afraid to see the morning’s headlines, but it is also the biggest urge I can’t resist. 

My nine year old is asleep next to me because he asked me to sleep with him last night, and lately he feels permanently attached to my side. “Can I just stay until you fall asleep?” I asked him, after he’d snuggled in tight. “You don’t have to sleep with me if you don’t want.” I kiss his baby cheeks, “I want.”

He asks me to leave the light on. It’s a king size bed and he’s still right next to me, his shoulder touching my shoulder. It took ages for me to fall asleep and I listening to playlist after playlist when the sound of his quiet breathing became less quieting, and more like little boy snores fueled by a day of fresh air. 

We have homeschool every day, a sort of make shift schedule that we slipped into like a swallowed knowing. But we begin the morning with mochas and cappuccinos and coffee made to order, toast with peanut butter and jelly, or waffles with coconut syrup. Peanut Butter Puffins with milk. Sometimes a pan of bacon. Biscotti if it’s there. 

Then, a barefoot spin or two around the backyard littered with early spring ephemera—twigs and seed pods and clumps of neon grass—and late winter cast-offs of broken toys and various athletic equipment buried in January by snow. The backyard looks a mess with all these broken items, but for him, they are building blocks for everything. Forts. Swings. Chairs. Mountains. Launchpads. 

Two nights ago he no longer needed an old chair in his room and I gave him a screwdriver to take it apart. He did. Then he tried to reconstruct it, without legs, to use on his bed, and he did so with packing tape. When that didn’t work, he put the chair back together with screws and then asked, “Can I use the saw?” This all happened at 10 pm. While he was wearing a swimsuit and his belly was rosy and warm from a bath. (In the hot tub.)

Last night they shattered a drinking glass in the hot tub. 

“Why did you have a glass in the hot tub?” I’m exasperated, but their insistence that we keep it a secret from dad sort of delights me in the most mischievous way, so I’m not angry, but I am curious. “Really,” I insist, “Why?” They look at me innocently: “We were thirsty.” 

It’s almost like projects beget projects, and they’re all inane, like we are inventing them so that we have something to do. I will go in the hot tub this morning to double check on the glass, that it’s all gone. And in a strange way I’m looking forward to the task.

I make a pound cake from scratch, a four hour Bolognese, pans of roasted things: salmon and brussels and broccoli. I am excited to vacuum, a productive chore with a clear beginning and end. Those lines in the carpet; the satisfaction of emptying the canister into the bin. I listen to The Daily. I double check for Live Coronavirus updates! I still do the puzzles. Always the puzzles. Crossword, sudoku. Some of us start to binge-watch, but I remain the one weirdo in the world for whom television isn’t a relief. It stirs me up too much lately, a concoction of boring and stimulating at the exact same time, my thoughts too wild to focus on anything. 

I need a haircut, I need my nails done, I need about 85 shots of Dysport in my face.   

I need to read this book in front of me. I need the words to not blur. 

I need to oversee, trouble shoot, offer encouragement, be a mom and a teacher. 

I need to run till my lungs ache with oxygen. I need to squat until my legs collapse beneath me. I need I need I need. 

My therapist says I need to own my needs. But here’s the thing about it: you have to know what your needs are first before you can actually own them. It’s harder to do with honesty than you might think. Today it’s running along the path by the creek; tomorrow it’s running away. Maybe?

It’s time for reading and they each settle in, kitty corner from each other, the sun bright on their knees that are draped over the wide arms of the chairs, and shiny on the tops of their dark haired heads. 

(I need to have another cup of coffee. I need to be with them. I need to fold the laundry. I need to go to the laundry room. I need to go. Somewhere, anywhere, upstairs, downstairs, outside, inside, upside down.)

After 30 minutes, the phone rings an alarm and they scramble to finish chapters before they stand to stretch their growing limbs. “You can just keep reading,” I suggest, my mind an eye roll on the thought that I want to say but don’t: “Because what else are we doing?” But we all thrive off the arbitrary parameters of this schedule, of a beginning and an end, and the implied overlay of certainty. 

Lunch. Rarely sandwiches. If so, then tuna. Or turkey and cheese on crackers. But usually more toast. Sometimes fancy, like avocado, with sea salt flecks and tiny puddles of olive oil and a slight smatter of crushed red pepper. Frizzled eggs for her, and pan seared grape tomatoes, both of which she makes for herself. 

It all feels so fancy for a 14 year old, but it’s creative, and she smiles and gets to sit with a painted plate, at a table cloth. It’s like she’s dining out, while dining in, and fostering another 30 minute moment in this very endless day. 

After lunch, Tik Toks, online dance classes, basketball on the driveway, YouTube or hiding in their rooms or texting friends or watching Netflix. I don’t mind, whatever they do, I don’t police them, I just let them be apart from me, however they are able. Our brains are on ice sometimes; we feel like zombies; our hearts are wrought, laced with the anxious swill of a pandemic. 

I order books again. I let myself have that. No guilt there; no library; I’m owning my needs. I print off recipes from the Food section. We replenish outgrown underwear and hole-marred socks found in the cervices of newly organized closets. Our daily life is a ritualistic act of spring cleaning. (What other project can we create?) And we walk the dog. Again and again. She’s never been so exercised. 

Fault Lines

A week ago, the earth upended and the floor underneath me rolled. Somehow I felt it coming in the unease of the air, urgent at the window. It was warning me, but I didn’t know of what and felt only the encroaching fear and so had swallowed, the night before, a cocktail of dread and two pretty pink oval-shaped Benadryl that pulled me deeply into sleep. 

I swear for one moment, just past five this morning, the earth started grumbling again. I google it; I see that I’m correct. I also see that there have been 272 earthquakes in the past week, disruptions that I never felt, callings unheeded. I don’t know why the fear consumes me so much, when this conversation between earth and sky—between the substance beneath my feet and the air around me—starts. Nor do I understand how this swallowing threatens, for the likelihood that I’m falling off a precipice into sudden death is not truly there, but it feels that way. Just utterly terrifying. Like I will fall out of the sky, like I will be crushed. Like both are inevitabilities. 

I’m worried. My teeth ache, my bones feel weary. I’m breathing in the atmosphere of collective anxiety, through the open windows, through the vents. I inhale this worry and hold my breath, unable to release it back out. This feeling is stickier than the actual virus and my lungs are lined with it, barbs of fear digging deep, their contagion getting closer and closer to infecting my heart. Again and again I forget to exhale. I cannot seem to breathe. 

Here’s what I do, when I worry. I start to assign that worry to things. It’s easier than just sitting with it somehow, and with a story comes the false assurance of explanation in the midst of crisis. They’re all just words, I tell myself. Words as symbols on a page to rewrite and cover and bury the heart of something I feel afraid of too. What is it? What is down there? 

I’m so worried about a certain child. It’s difficult for me to parse the real story of a life so far, and how we got here, to this exact second, and knowing my own fumbling movements in the game, I place blame squarely on myself. It doesn’t make sense, it’s a bad habit, but I do it anyway. I think of the dishonesty we raised her with, the lies, the new and confusing insistence on trusting yourself and bucking old-world convention. It’s a school of hard knocks, this having to live real life, this insistence to “adult.” And I wonder at this balance: how much do parents need to lose themselves inside their kids’ lives? When is it time for kids to take responsibility for their own lives? When will it cease to be my fault, for being careful and careless and distracted and loving and overbearing and changing and human?

It’s a strange conversation because none of us know. We don’t know what’s real; we don’t know what comes next. We never knew. Knowing was a lie, another story, another ending that was never meant to be and was promised in ways that only promised to be disappointments. We had to let so much go, and I think subconsciously I fear the rushing flow of that loss, and I hold on tight with teeth that clamp down so hard on nothing but the hard edge of each other. And they hurt all the time with this effort, and I imagine, an interpretation without a mirror, that the edges of them look like chipped porcelain teacups, with graying delicate webs of miniscule hairline cracks. 

It’s strange to be this way, standing here anyway, bare in our unknowing. It’s strange to feel how I feel, and to judge myself for my gestures toward selfishness even while I let myself be selfish. It feels like I am the cause of everything bad—emotional instability, their instability, the earth’s instability—but I am unable to let it go. It’s as though everything unstable is caused by this egotism, little earthquakes of undoing every time I drive away and ignore something “important” to choose myself. And even as I hold the willful allowance—really, the conscious choice—of these earthquakes inside me, I am convinced of their ripple effect, the lashings of an untamed wildness inside of me that causes injury outside of me. 

Or maybe this is just the role I have written for myself. 

I can change that story. That’s easy enough. (Write/rewrite/write/rewrite.)

The earth shakes, then my hands shake, and with those trembling hands, I pick up my pen.

Right now, I keep choosing my writing. I keep choosing words. I keep choosing that I want to string them together in convoluted sentences as a way to write my own belief upon paper in a notebook in hopes that it etches, too, oaths on my heart. 

But what I also want is to be downstairs, helping Jude with his homework. There are just no two ways about it. I want to inch back into motherhood with the daily menial tasks of it. The chores and the overseeing element of everything feeling so sweetly in control and under one roof—only I keep wandering out from under that roof, into the sunshine, into the wind and rain, into different, unexplored spaces like a curious little explorer. And then I want to go back. 

I texted my sister in law after the earthquake. I told her that I was scared. She texted back to me: “You’re moving and shaking all on your own.” 

I am; I am going to crack. 

Earthquakes

It all started before it even started. 

Nine pm the night before, and I’m all anxious. I’ve spent the day writing, sequestered away in my writing hovel of a room that overlooks the snow dusted Wasatch, drinking shots of espresso from miniscule sky blue ceramic cups, and moving from desk to chair to kitchen to toilet in a sort of quiet electric track. I was consumed by words—the New York Times, the local paper, texts and more texts, the Microsoft doc in front of me. Thoughts were heavy but full of hope, and I wrote and wrote, page after page, three times on the same essay. 

By late afternoon, the wind blew so strong that the window panes rattled in their grooves. It rattled me off my screen, finally made me look up and acknowledge earth. It was stuffy inside and I opened the window closest to me up wide. Social distancing and home isolation made the normal ambient outside noise quieter than usual but it was pierced, singularly, by an abrupt wailing siren. It seemed almost like a hint: a harbinger of doom, the clarion sound of warning, and I felt the trickle of my own anxiety seep in at the edges. I know the feeling well. I know my body; I know the signs. Do I venture outside to calm myself? Do I breathe fresh air and run until my legs ache and my heart beats against my ribs like the drumbeat of something tribal and ancient? It usually seems to help. But I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but sit there, opened up; and I let the gusting in of dust from the backyard and bacteria from the street and the freshness of the grass sweep over me. 

It’s all surreal—living in the state of a pandemic. The “once upon a time” daily march of just a few days ago becomes a tiptoe, like life needs to be lived gingerly and treated with kid gloves. As though the normalcy we took for granted is too permeable and weak to sustain us—like if I push too much, if I think too much, if I wonder too much, it will all rend, the whole fabric of society, of my heart, my life as I know it in tatters. 

I tell myself over and over that I am ok. That the rising anxiety is simply what happens at the end of the evening, when thoughts of bedtime and snippets of the day gather. And I’m tired from writing and thinking and opening my heart in ways that make it raw. 

I go to sleep. 

It’s still dark out the next morning when the room starts to sway, when the rumble gurgles up from the bowels of the earth. I am already awake, but still in bed. I know instantly what is happening and say out loud, “no no no no no.” I am terrified and immobile, certain the house will collapse. I am frozen to the spot, curling tight like a pink shrimp in a hot pan, bare shoulders tight against my ears, and knees to my chin. I start to cry; I am afraid. I want it to stop; it gets stronger. The lamp falls over on my nightstand, my phone clatters to the floor and flickers bright then goes dark as the power from the charger is lost and gone. 

Once things feel like they’re slowing, once the earth seems to right itself, the room is consumed in a stillness so precarious that I don’t trust it, sure it will break any moment. No car alarms, no flashing lights, no sirens, no cries. The power is gone, the detail is gone, everything gone. The house is a place of lumps and indistinct contours, lost from itself. Only the pendant lights still move, back and forth like three warning pendulums, or thuribles dangling from chains, wafting incense, prayers to god made visible. The motion will not stop. They are silent bells. The sway is the reminder.

I dress in the complete pitch black, needing desperately to hold my kids, crying to myself in the dark, my hands too shaky to pull on socks. All the books are slumped over on each other like lazy tin soldiers. The glasses in the sink are on their sides; the speaker on the counter is on its side; the pillows on my writing chair dented from where I sat yesterday, anticipating something but not understanding. 

I’m in the light of the kitchen with him, our eyes stunned. Neither of us speak. What is there to say? Did you feel that? We both did. Are you ok? We aren’t sure. 

We speak in arms that hold tight and don’t let go. Kids that find those same arms and fall into us separately, together. But by the time they wake, they are all smiles and I see that I am the only one who is troubled. They are just waking up, another day of homeschool and novels and elaborate breakfasts, eggs to order and choices of toast, and they just want mama. I hug them tight, feeling the solid hefts of their steady backs. They breathe in and out, the unfettered sort of breath that trusts that things are normal and their heartbeats are calm and sure. I try to grasp the cadence of these heartbeats; I try to let it affect the pulse in my wrist, I force that pulse to control my heart, hoping my entire circulatory system will mimic that fixed, unworried beat.

Maybe their hearts to my heart are like the call and response of animals in conversation. “It’s ok,” they’re telling me. “It’s ok.”

I believe them; I don’t believe them. They are young. What do they know? They’re still sanitized from the backwards track of trauma that won’t loom its ugly head till middle age. 

The fear of this 5.7 earthquake outside Salt Lake City on March 18, 2020 is like this, like the flicker at the end of a film strip: It is 1989. I live in a neighborhood nestled in the gold foothills of Northern California. I am almost 13. One day in October there is an earthquake—just another one in a string of them really. But this one is big. 7.2. I was at a piano lesson in Morgan Hill. I was sitting at the piano, my hands on the keys when it started. My teacher ran out of the room and I followed her, the carpet undulating below our feet. (I close my eyes now and still see how the ground under our feet looked like the hills outside the window. Rolling. Everything rolling.) I got home to the news on the television, news that stayed on for weeks. Total destruction. The freeway, the Bay Bridge, Candlestick Park. Entire blocks of buildings in SF. Wreckage in Santa Cruz. Images of familiar parts of our life—driving into The City from the East Bay, Giants games on Sunday afternoons, the solid places we would go without thinking, now falling over frail and pathetic, no longer institutions. Just dust. There and then not there. A thing then not a thing. Over and over and over. 

Then, I remember 1983. I am in first grade. I see Mrs. Gish telling us to duck and cover, her body moving like a windsock. We’ve just come in from recess and the classroom is dim and quiet. As we moved to curl up in tiny balls of human flesh and Velcro sneakers under our baby desks covered in pencil marks and eraser droppings, plastic chairs tip backwards onto the floor, a light from the ceiling crashes onto a desk. 

There is fear swallowed (There must be! But I don’t remember this.); this is life in California as a kid. I skip home, a mile along the paseo with my bestie, and we steal a pomegranate out of a tree and break it open on the sharp edges of a boulder that is as high as our shoulders. We eat the red seeds while we chat and walk, holding pomegranate rinds in our hands like petite saucers and shards of glass. Our fingers are red with pomegranate blood by the time we make it home, but this means nothing. We wipe our hands on the thighs of our pants legs, we run into our respective houses, we eat dinner, we sleep. 

These will be traumas deterred. 

And so. 

Today I am shook. Today I shake. My hands won’t stop. They themselves become tiny tremors that can’t button or zip, that can barely type. At 13 they somehow still played the piano; at seven they held fistfuls of arils. They held steady back then; today they will try.

I don’t understand pandemics yet but earthquakes I get. Somehow this made fear real.  

I reel. 

Dispatches From A Mom, On the Outskirts of a Pandemic

I put on overalls again. Simply. Unceremoniously. Unfolding them from the pile of skinny denim and vintage 501’s and leggings—the costumes of different women who are all me. I love those women too—I love those coverings, but they’re not right for today. Today I slipped the overalls on so effortlessly, the cotton worn soft from years of work and wear that it barely touched the dry skin of my legs. 

Still, the softness was familiar. The weight of the straps along my shoulders just right. It was like putting on an old uniform and suiting up for battle. I am a worker. I am a soldier. I’m a citizen. I am a mom. I am a woman. I will fight.

It feels purposeful, to do this again. To be busy like this in the mornings. To be at home with my kids on a weekday. Load after load of laundry—all the bedding, all the sweatshirts balled in the corners of the closets and the unpaired socks hidden under beds and tangled in pant legs. Every linen in every bathroom. All of it. So much of it that I sort it outside the laundry room, similar colors and textures in piles that are orderly and satisfying, while the breeze from the open window brings with it the scent of detergent and the hint of spring. Something fresh and alive in this time of our own sort of cholera: in this time of coronavirus. 

Home isolation. Home school. Home. I slip back into mothering my teens like they are toddlers as easily as I slipped back on overalls. Life feels like it did when they were little. When we had the whole day to while away in between four walls and 12 hours and enough mind space and clay and blocks to really imagine. I am informed every day first thing, cracking my laptop to the news and looking up an hour later to what feels daily like a new world. But a new world where we are still only armed with the old basics to navigate us in this uncharted territory. I am making breakfast, wiping down surfaces, starting the dishes again and again, touching the tops of still-warm bed-heads, asking about dreams, reminding hand-washing and hydration, vacuuming, dusting, lighting candles, opening blinds, cracking windows. The countertops sparkle with Clorox, the panes sparkle with Windex and the morning sunshine. It feels soft: the light, the air, the cushion underneath me, the way we handle each other. Just soft. 

The teachers have sent schedules and so the whole home-bound thing feels more purposeful at once. Like we are doing our part to fight the war in an orderly and color-coded way. We are reading school assignments so that this break won’t require summer school, and we’re patient with each other because life is fragile (and are you getting a runny nose?) and we’re not going out to the gym or the coffee shop (because that runny nose probably means you are a carrier!) and we’re making the most basic and nourishing spaghetti on the stove, and solving high school math equations online as a way to combat a pandemic. 

I feel guilt that I am enjoying the ease of it. That I am enjoying them—these once upon a time little people who so quickly have grown into big people—and these slow days. I feel guilty that we have the privilege to, as a family, collectively exhale. We don’t worry about how the mortgage will be paid or where lunch will come from. We order new puzzles on Amazon and the next book in the latest series. But this too feels like part of the fight—the part where we control the demand end of the supply chain, where we do our part for the economy. 

I can let things go, I can add things up, I can buy; others can’t. I worry for them. I’m moved by the way the schools offer free meals to grab and take. I’m moved that they offer hot-spots and Chromebooks to check out. I’m moved that we pull together for the greater good and that the need of the struggling and hungry is tantamount in any decision to close anything down. It makes me pine for ways to strengthen those that can’t do it alone, for none of us can. Not really. It’s been the great unfolding in my mind, these past few days, as the nation frets and plummets and reacts and rises as a whole, as every facet of all of our lives is touched by this virus, in this moment. 

I wonder whether this will change our life forever. Not in an emotional sense. I mean it will, although I know we’ll go back to busyness and business as usual the way we fall into sleep and dreams: without much consciousness. But in a practical way, I wonder how this will change the world. Will school and extra-curriculars be done online? Will more work be done mobile? Will universities be able to charge less tuition for remote classrooms? Can we do all our doctors’ appointments via video conferencing? Can that lack of overhead mitigate medical costs? And what about the toilet paper? Will it force us to rethink necessity? Will we be more grateful? Will we share more and hoard less? And in sharing will we learn to sacrifice? Are we willing to forgo self to benefit the whole and aid the other? Will we be shown the truth of how little pieces on each of our parts will lead to impactful change? 

We really are all in this together, reduced as one to the essential struggling, the fight of all fights, our most basic element: health. Our very next breath. This day.