Movie Night, Late Pandemic, 2021

Photo by Philippe Ramakers on Unsplash

I wonder if this is true for you: when you are going through something long, and difficult, and arduous (like chronic illness, or a global pandemic) everything gets so much more difficult in the final stages, when the end loos so near, and relief seems truer than ever. That’s where I am today, gritting my teeth behind my mask and desperate to just hug someone without checking in on their vaccine status first.

I danced with the concert projected on the wall

swore I could smell the beer pounded into the floor

by all the feet that didn’t show on screen.

My morning walk feels eerie now —

not from late October chill and the suggestion of the thinning veils,

but from the flatness of people in three dimensions.

I meet their eyes and they go flat,

dull as the picture on an overtouched smart phone.

I forgot how to talk outside rectangles, with panoramic backdrop.

This thing I used to do —

stepping joyfully into arms opened before me —

I walk first into the flatness (are you vaccinated?)

before I tumble, headlong, in he abyss of someone else’s breath.