Covid sounds close to co-morbid. Co-morvid? What are the afflictions that come, hand in (thoroughly washed) hand, with Coronavirus? Malaise, both physical (quarantine, avoidance of gyms as petrie dishes even in the healthiest of times, lack of movement beyond a certain safe-feeling radius) and mental: we’re in a holding pattern, as if the entire globe is a single plane circling above its destination indefinitely, uncertain of when we’ll land, what the landing will feel like, or if we’ll run out of fuel first. A terrible snow day that doesn’t have an end in sight.

The event that marked my first year of college was 9/11 – it didn’t affect me in the same way it affected students who had just moved to NYC, or my classmates who were from NYC, but it defined our year and especially our fall. Classes weren’t canceled immediately (and, obviously, the tenor of the tragedy made cancelations a step taken for emotional reasons rather than physical ones), and students without direct connections to New York wandered around Providence – the city we’d lived in for just two weeks – speculating abstractly about the event, until they ran into a friend or unit-mate from New York and suddenly nothing was theoretical anymore.

Many of the students I teach now weren’t born in 2001. Some of those who were (barely) are now in their first year of college, not yet sure if they’ll be going back to finish second semester. They’ve spent their entire lives online to one degree or another, and either because of this or in spite of this they’re desperate to go back, physically, to the places they’ve only recently begun to think of as their own.

There’s is something poetic about the measures we take to minimize risk and exposure. I envision the standard protocols – wash your hands, don’t touch your face, avoid groups, no hugs or handshakes – as a series of face masks, each filtering out smaller and smaller particles. None is a guarantee of continued health, but each reduction builds on your percent chance of not getting sick. On its own each might be minimally effective, a wet piece of tissue struggling to sustain a heavy burden, but as the layers increase so does the strength.

I keep wanting to not post this until I’ve revised it or thought about it SUPER carefully to make sure I’m saying what I mean, but everything is changing so fast that if I do that, everything I’ve said will be out of date.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has 2 comments.