Last week made a year ago that I went to work in person for the last time. The students were notified on Wednesday the 11th that they would need to go home the following week to start taking classes remotely, but staff intended to continue working in person. That weekend I spent a few hundred dollars buying groceries that I could freeze. It was the last time I entered a grocery store for almost 6 months. We got an email that Sunday telling us not to come in the following day, and I haven’t been back to work in person since.
Mari Andrews posted recently about how losing something implies that you once had it, but so many of us this year have been grieving things we never had in the first place. “I can remember the sweet days of an alternate life that I’m just now admitting will never exist,” she says.
I think about every visit I never got to have with my grandmother in the nursing home while I could still be sure she recognized me and the funeral we didn’t get to have for her. I think about Harry going to sleep for the last time without me holding him. I think about every tango I never got to dance in churches and living rooms and foreign countries. I think about the patatas bravas at Mimi’s that I’ll never get to eat. About all the meatball and taco dinners that I didn’t have with James, the year’s worth of dinner parties that Sophie never got to host, the craft party we never had with Katie and Derrick, the cookies Elijah never brought me in the airport, conversations we never had in Sam and Nick’s living room. The people we were pulled away from or pushed suffocatingly close to. The flights I never booked and that beach trip we had to cancel. The Rusty Nail bar trivia we might have won. I think about the writers who might have inspired me at the Dogfish readings that never happened. I think about the alternate versions of ourselves that we’ll never know if we might have been.
Of course there is also unforeseen beauty and joy in this new reality we’ve found ourselves in that we wouldn’t have known to miss if things hadn’t turned out this way. New relationships born in spite of these circumstances but in strange ways enhanced because of it. Reconnections with old friends who might have always remained distant. New hobbies. New appreciation for the things I once took for granted. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay to grieve a previously imagined present while appreciating the current one.
I got my first vaccine dose last week. It felt simultaneously like it changed nothing and everything. People are smiling without masks in public and talking about glimpsing normalcy now, but I don’t know how to stop calculating. Calculating the number of days since the vaccine and the number of days until the next one, calculating how many people have been in my proximity in public and how many feet they were from me, calculating how long ago I might have last been exposed to the virus by that stranger who walked by too close in the grocery store, calculating the number of days that have passed since a casual interaction that to me felt like a close call. A year ago I would have told you that this level of hyper-awareness and paranoia is absolutely not sustainable for any extended period. I’m here to tell you that I was wrong about that because here I am, over a year later, still vigilant, still calculating. It is very hard for me to recognize the fine line that exists between a justifiable level of caution and over-the-top paranoia. Which is to say, I do not think there will be such thing as a tidy “after the pandemic” cross-over for me. I do not think that a switch will flip two weeks after my second vaccine where I assume I’m safe to re-enter the social world with carefree ease and joy. I think instead that new levels of normal will gently and gradually seep into each other in small increments. My family and I are planning a beach trip together since we will all be vaccinated. I’m thinking about international travel in the hopefully-not-too-distant future. These feel like things worth poking my head out of my bunker and looking forward to.
The pharmacy where I got my vaccine was empty when I arrived. I thought it would feel momentous, but it felt strange instead—walking into a pharmacy I’ve never been to to let a pharmacist jab me with substance I don’t want to think too much about. (I didn’t even know pharmacists give vaccines.) But while I was there, a man and his elderly father came in together for their vaccines, too. We were across the room from each other and didn’t speak, but we made eye contact for a second. A moment of recognition. Now my father will be safer. Now my family can be safer. This moment may feel mundane, but it is life-altering and we are experiencing it together. Then the pharmacist said, “Kayla, you can go.” And even though I had only waited for about 5 minutes instead of the generally required 15, I got up and left, and somehow the world looked normal outside.
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