So I found this buried in my notes, written when the pandemic still had a chokehold on the world. It was mostly a stream of consciousness, just spilling out how all the death seemed so needless and how unreal everything felt, but I thought I might share.
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It seems terribly strange, sometimes, living in the now and thinking of the "before".
Before 'PPE' and 'social distancing' became terms so familiar that the vinegar taste of them lingers for every hundredth time they're spoken.
Before masks, hand sanitizer, and plexiglass made everyday retail a bizarre liminal atmosphere; halfway real, halfway unreal, fully unsettling.
Before preventable death became an exhaustive stream of ticker tape on the daily newsreel, lives measured in scrolling font.
Before all of This, where there is yet to be an After.
In my own little hemisphere of existence a single word often punctures through, frequenting even the most mundane: surreal.
When I realize my brain now marks every interaction as a risk, and measures safety in the cozy number 6.
There's a level at which my anxiety relishes in this new necessity of perfectionist avoidance, rejoices at the automation of wired awareness. It keeps it occupied, at least, while the months run through my fingers and take lives and the memory of Normal with them.
The chasm between what is and could've been is wide, and the small but stable spit of land I stand on is better by far than the cliff opposite. I know how the world could've looked from there.
There is no lack of gratitude for what I have in a world that seems so terribly intent on taking away
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