Chrysalis

It’s been a long, strange week. Last week at this time, I was walking around AJ’s deserted college campus as Mr. Spy helped him load his things into our car two months prematurely. I am glad to see him, grateful he is home, but he is utterly miserable and I am miserable for him.

New Yorkers are not accustomed to social distancing. We are used to our faces being pressed into someone else’s armpit on the subway on a hot summer day, to people barreling straight into us on the sidewalk rather than veering a few inches to the left, to lines, to crowds. But we are good at waiting for things.
Treating people like they might be poison feels wrong. So did not petting the corgi pup who flopped up to me on my run on Thursday. Instead I yelled to the owner 6 feet away, over the music pounding in my headphones, “Your dog is beautiful!” “Gracias, thank you.”

I am not a runner but now I am a runner, every day this week out the door by 7:30. I walk fast past the shopping street, past the school, past the porched houses to the road full of mansions with the green parkway. I use it like a track because the park is too crowded. Three laps then home. Running to or from something, I’m not sure. It makes me feel stronger. It burns the nervous energy I have nowhere to put. I have lost more than two pounds this week and I feel like I barely leave the armchair in the corner of my bedroom that is serving as my office for now.

AJ turns 19 this week. We can’t even shop for him properly, but we will attempt a celebration and I have ordered an ice cream cake, which I will attempt to shoehorn into the freezer until Wednesday. Our pantry is full, we are healthy, at least for now. I still have a job, at least for now. We check in on our neighbors through the kitchen window. The twin babies next door point at Jaguar in the window and say “cat!.” They are nearly walking and if you put on Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” they will dance in the stroller that their parents push them around in for hours. One kicks her feet high in the air; the other shakes her head back and forth and wriggles.

Last night was unexpectedly warm. We sat on our porch and watched the parade of skateboarders, bikers, walkers, convertibles going by. But for the masks there was hardly a sign that anything had changed.

Everything is blooming. Everything is beautiful. Everything is making me sneeze (into my elbow, of course).

I don’t know if we should leave the city.

I don’t know what I want to have for lunch.

I don’t know if I can pay my rent.

I don’t know if I can finish the song I started.

I don’t know if I can make one more decision.

I don’t know when I will walk out my door and feel like I’m not under attack from an invisible enemy.

I don’t know if I can do this for one minute longer, but I will.

I don’t know who we will be when we emerge from this cocoon.