COVID CRISIS; An Anthology of Vignettes | 2022
Growing on Me
A dull but piercing white light snaked through my eyes. It flooded my vision and crowded my mind. I hadn't been outside for a couple weeks now. My back had grown hunched and arched, gradually stiffening, like a young tree thickening with fibrous and gnarly bark. My body had been frozen, rooted to my chair, embedded and infused, growing into and becoming one with smushed pillows on my back. A small screen had grown over my life, slithering, latching on, and growing on me like a sickly green vine. I stared blankly at my computer, a bright blue glare bouncing off my glasses, and my face started to melt. It melted, conformed, and fused like molten glass to the reflective shiny toy. I had become a dumb bird merely waiting and watching, amused by the mere glitter and sparkle of my screen. My stream of vision narrowed down to a small tunnel. Somehow regardless of how everything else in my room glowed with sunlight coming through my window, nothing matched the brilliant, vibrant, colorful, and neon life I could live through my screen.
A bark from my dog turned into a sharp boulder that shattered my trance like glass that had bit by bit grown larger and overflown my consciousness. I glanced outside my window and I saw my street. Beautiful and growing, with nature seeping through cracks of cement on the sidewalks, flawless blue skies, trees kindly offering shade to the street below, and delicate precise white clouds.
But something else lurked on my perfect little street. It slinked through the cracks between the bottom of doors, the small gaps in windows that had never been trouble before, it soared through the sky and settled in the air, and was birthed from coughs and sneezes, nauseously fixing itself in my brain as a sick yellow. Coronavirus. It had ripped through millions of lives, rampantly tearing its way through countries, viciously barging through continents and had somehow made it right here, right in my neighborhood, just a window away. This strange new novelty wasn’t the only thing lurking. Fear had probed and poked and people had given in. I had given in.
A Reality Warped by Tears
Anxiety engulfed me, and swallowed me whole, my fear swelling. I was outside, out in the battlefield where so many people I knew had suffered and fallen to the enemy. A crowned victor killing all. A white mask was glued to my face, carving skin into red lines from the top of my nose to the bottom of my chin, I breathed in the furry fiber on the inside of my mask and although the thick cottony paper laid plastered on my face, barely letting me breath, it felt as thin as the air I sucked in, I felt bare, exposed, defenseless, weak. I looked around and took in my surroundings, a grocery store. The one I always went to, the one I was familiar with. Where I had gotten snacks for school, gone shopping for Thanksgiving dinners. The place that had been friendly, echoing with fond memories, was no longer what I remembered. It looked the same, certainly. Tile floors with a cheap brown speckle, dull white lights, shining over vegetables, and aisles and aisles of colorful packaged food.
But there was an emptiness to it, in fact, the place was empty. There wasn't the usual bustle of people hurrying to get their food, but in place of it, a surreal, serene, emptiness. No faces floated down aisles, and no small conversations between cashiers and shoppers jostled through the air, and no small children jumped around with tear streaked eyes calling for their parents. The few faces that appeared walked quietly, like ghosts, gliding silently across the floor, all adult faces covered with two masks, one covering their nose and mouth and the other covering their thoughts. In their carts cleaning products scraped the ceiling on top of a jarring mountain of toilet paper, each item worth its weight in gold, daring you to come by and knock it over with a push.
I pushed my cart around, rediscovering the place I hadn’t seen in so long, familiarizing myself with every step. I reached out to grab a box of cereal, and as I did bare skin brushed the metal shelf. I stopped, paused time, and desperately wracked my brain, throwing thoughts, moving memories. How long does covid live on metal? “The coronavirus can survive on plastic and stainless-steel surfaces for up to 72 hours”. 72 hours. The sentence swirled around my head. I drowned in it. Something I thought as deadlier than poison could be alive and had latched on to me. Then my memories from that morning broke the divide I had so carefully created to keep me safe. In the four months that school had gone online 165,955 had gotten covid, with an incredible mortality rate. I could be the 165,956th. No matter where I stepped, there was no guarantee that I would be safe. It was in the air, alive, unstoppable and regardless of me washing my hands or masking, taking all precautions, there was still a chance. I could miss a spot on my hands, the spot making home to the virus, I could have left a gap in my mask the one gap virus sized, waiting to let it in. My eyes welled, catching tears, which then dribbled down my cheek catching the invisible fuzz on my face and dampening my mask. I cried, how silly could I be? Or should I have been savoring my tears? Was this the truth? Or was this just a reality warped by tears?
Swallow Me Whole
Every morning I woke up and repeated. I repeated the same thing. Every. Single. Day. I was a well oiled machine, a perfect, immaculate, precise contraption. My eyelashes fluttered, and my eyes opened slowly against the heavy weight of the air. The minute sunlight flooded into my eyes I already knew what time it was. “8:00, it's 8:00.” My fingers traced the surface of my phone until I found the button. I pressed my phone and it lit up with a picture of my dog that is ingrained and chiseled in my brain. It was exactly 8:00 am; I knew it. I stared up blankly at my ceiling, my vision blurring in and out, and, out and in. My mind stretched, pulling me out of my bed hauling me, like a snow dog lugging a sleigh. My foot touched the ground and my skin made contact with cold stiff wood.
I was circled by and engulfed in mountains of clothes, papers, bags, shoes, anything. But it was organized chaos, I knew where every single thing in my room was. I sure as hell wasn't ready for my math assessment, but hey, ask me where to find my white and blue teddy bear with a golden bow from Washington DC on a keychain that my mom’s coworker gave to me, and my brain had an intricate pathway, a perfect individual route to find it floating within the flood of things. But as I stood still, I sunk into the floor, the weight of my body dragging me down, letting my room swallow me whole as I barely opened my eyes, afraid to let in more of the bright pain from the sun. My floor was quicksand and every step I took slowed me down. Invisible hands latched on to every one of my limbs, pulling me to the floor. But when I made it to my door, I couldn't think of a reason to leave. My stomach no longer even ached with the familiar pang of hunger, I had settled into the dry feeling in my mouth, and outside my room was colder than where I was now. I looked behind my eyes, traveled carefully, and found a door. I trembled as I reached out to open it, but when I looked inside, I found nothing, and it shook me to my core. I ran away crying.
My mind was lifeless, colorless, frozen, and cold. I remembered a time when everything was alive, thawed life running through every thought in my brain. I had switched to autopilot. My heart was pumping, and my lungs were inflating and deflating, but my mind was a faucet that had run dry. I manically grabbed a wire and plugged it into my brain with a sigh of ease. The drought was over, sweet, ambrosian, delicious, rainbow, sharp, acidic, animated, vivacity and life cut through the dull gray of existence. It seeped in moistening and rehydrating everything that had died and shriveled up but as I ventured, with a bounce in my step, I looked around and saw everything decaying, the fabric of this reality glitching away. But only if I looked too closely, for if I stepped back and took off my glasses, this world was definitely real. I could touch it, feel it, and taste it on the tip of my tongue, this was real.
But this spontaneity, this chaos, was all planned. I knew every detail of that day, I knew exactly what would happen and I had no control over any of it. I knew my schedule, my calendar, I knew everything. So I didn't linger on regret. I checked the news, “How many people have died today?”. I needed something sweet, in my desk was a bag of sour patch kids, great. My back hurt, I laid down on my bed, problem fixed. How much longer did I have to function while awake? It was numbingly simple, and I was infinitely running in circles through time, like a hamster on a wheel.
I could barely hold on to the memory of the day, but suddenly I blinked. The sun had dropped like a weight out of the sky’s grasp, and another day had gone by, and I wasn't in it.
