Social Distancing: Hard Days, and The Morning After
We are all on our own timetables. Depending on where you live, you could be a couple of weeks behind me in terms of community impact, or depending on your personal sensitivity you may already be feeling this at 100. Your hormone shifts might feel worse than usual. The feelings you're constantly outrunning will finally catch up. For me, it's sadness and sorrow. It will seem as though letting yourself feel them all the way will kill you, and yet there you will be the next morning, writing about it in your journal with a pen you hate because the good ones are running out of ink.
Your appetite may take strange turns. You might go on a peanut butter cookie kick, or two days later feel as though you can't get anything down at all.
We will all have our own personal tipping points. You will be fine, just fine, until your stomach is upset and the toilet breaks on a Sunday. The man at the hardware store will tell you that you have nice eyes, but also that you should not attempt this repair yourself. Nothing in the store resembles the part you need and the Super will not reply to your message. It will be gray and rainy and you will miss your friends and their sweetness like oxygen. Your head will be too heavy to hold up without propping against a wall or dropping onto a pillow. You will climb back into bed.
The false beliefs you struggle with will be loud in your ears. The physical ache of longing, for a new life or an old one. Anything to escape the discomfort of this moment, the loud clamor of yourself, unmuted in the relative quiet and stillness of isolation.
I mean, I'm just guessing here.
Most of all I want you to know about the morning after. When the sky though still cloudy, lets just a bit more light through. And you feel immediately after waking you will hold your head up today even before coffee. The sorrow didn't kill you, the morning after says like birdsong. Here is proof! You are still here. Breathing, swallowing, yearning as always to find something beautiful or terrifying--but just true. You will drop the bucket down inside yourself. Deeper and deeper still, until you find it.