In this together

The thing I miss most is being able to go. Go to the store, to the airport, to a meeting, just away.
That lost time where I hold coffee and boarding pass in one hand while I reach for the wallet in my handbag to pay for the cereal bars I always stock at home and forget to pack. Will I remember the moves to this shuffle when I fly alone next? I miss browsing paperbacks with no intent to buy. The ability to touch new spines, new words, new spaces in the minutes before we lift weightless into blue sky.

This is what I miss, the time I stayed up all night answering emails and doing laundry before getting on a flight to see my parents. That time we took vacations on a whim. This going to the airport, dropping the rental car off, the hiss of the shuttle bus as the doors close and we go. Go toward home, anywhere. Go wash dishes, leave them to drip-dry on the black granite of my mother's counters. Go away from here.

And in lieu of that we are here. Here in this strange place of indeterminate time where people drop like flies. Where I worry that my parents must wash their own dishes and worry if the neighbors go in to help. Fear if you touch the wrong potato at the grocery store. Hope that me staying home, you staying put, this whole planet of us halted in a collective freeze dance to the tune of love will keep them safe, these places and people and hearts so far beyond where any flight will take us now.

This universal exercise in holding still. Learning to make like a tree, rooted where we are planted, we grow things. One friend's sourdough smells like old socks but will make beautiful bread, she says. Another sows cilantro for the first time. We notice sparrow song and where the cobblestones in the backyard dip to make a puddle where my daughter's rainboots fit. She hops and hops and lifts against the air until she is breathless.

We dig deep, into ourselves and earth and pantry and couch and all these places we hope will be safe. Strongholds where we can burrow, grow, emerge stronger collectively. Stay, we say. Stay home. Stay safe. Stay still. Stay strong. Stay well. Perhaps if we dig deep enough these illusions of home and wellness and strength will flourish within our planted, stationary selves. Perhaps this is how notions of home evolve from visions of cheery warmth into the jagged, frayed, sticky truth of family that never leaves no matter how far you go. Perhaps this is how love branches across the distant world, the way leaf tip never touches root and yet is always connected. Perhaps this is how we learn how we are all together, always. Even when I go, I stay. Even when I am here, I am there.

(Five months into the 2020 pandemic)