My masking becomes more elaborate

On my way to collect laundry, I pass a circle of camp chairs surrounding a small fire outside my neighbor's apartment. A man I do not know comes outside and tries to greet me. I take four steps away from him, using the excuse of my earphones and dash back to my apartment without his coming within breathing distance.

I don't recall a negative interaction with my neighbor prior. We've talked about his elderly cat. I may have had cause to tell him when Jareth died or when Columbia escaped. He offered that he would give me some peppers when they grew, though he never did, and I did not mind. I couldn't tell you his name, but we had a cordial relationship.

Now that he has brought potential vectors for reigniting COVID when the complex has had no symptomatic cases, I suspect him. He lives beneath a family with two young children and a woman over sixty. A gathering in the yard is a foolhardy indulgence.

I miss my friends. I have not seen my family in months, having missed Easter to prevent the spread. I am a social animal and I am lonely. Amber is great company, but I miss going to restaurants and plays, hikes and picnics. Now is the time of the year when I most want to be with my people. I accept that, for the common good, I am not supposed to see anyone who does not live in my house until the curve is sufficiently flattened. A vaccine will not be forthcoming for a year, it seems. It is still unclear whether immunity to COVID-19 is permanent or even particularly long-lasting. If reinfection is possible once one recovers--the science is not in--a vaccine will not be possible. I am not sure how we manage if this is accurate, so I will continue to assume that we can become immune.

I cannot wait a year without social interaction, but I can manage more than six weeks when seeing how devastating this virus, both to people and society. I am both annoyed and jealous that other people have taken such a cavalier attitude toward this public health crisis. This is why coronavirus is apt to reignite, increasing how long we will have to stay shut down.

I planned to drive to Maryland to see Daniel. I had requested two personal days, back when that meant something. Now, it is insane to consider interstate travel for something as petty as seeing a friend whom I love.

There is no god above ready to award me a gold star and tell me that, because I quarantined so well, it is now safe to interact with impunity. What is the metric we much meet before it is possible to sit outside around a fire with friends?

At the grocery store, a man tapped me on the shoulder, startling me at this invasion of my six-foot boundary. He smiled broadly, which I knew because he was not wearing a mask. He held it up, a blue surgical one.

"It broke, see? But I have a mask. It just broke."

This was why he was touching me, to let me know that he would be maintaining the proper etiquette otherwise. He did not understand that I would be more bothered by an unmasked stranger touching me than I would be seeing one at a safer distance.

I don't understand what he thought I could do for him. I wasn't going to give him mine. He may have only wanted me to know that he had been obeying the protocol so that I would not condemn him.

Having apprised me of his masklessness, he walked off to touch boxes of vitamins and laxatives as though they might be in Braille. This man will be comfortable mingling among the hoi polloi well before I am.

I am in stasis. My year is dwindling. It is May, I know, but there is not the texture this year that May has held every other time we have met. Early sunlight stream through my windows and I feel a flutter in my chest, a thrill of the promise of a summer to come. This year, it is yet another day when I must not go out much or make plans with my friends for the weekend. I take part in teleconferences every weekday and post work for my students (that most do not attempt). There is nothing more that distinguishes a Tuesday from a Sunday.

A few days ago, it snowed heavily, contributing to the sensation that this iteration of the simulation had broken. Little snow stuck around, but it was uncomfortable to endure a squall in early May. This is wrong, my heart told me, but it also doesn't matter because nothing can anymore.

The day after, it was close to seventy and sunny.

I have tried to maintain a routine. Even if the hours are irrelevant, my list of tasks gives structure. Amber and I go to bed and get up early every day, little different than we would if I had to show up to work. I look forward to sleeping because my underutilized mind spews forth strange and vivid dreams that exceed the entertainment value of lingering around my apartment to fight a war of attrition against an invisible enemy (to whom I might have already been subject and conquered, but we cannot be tested for antibodies yet). Amber plays her game, which makes things a little different, digital chores to complement the actual ones. Days matter within the game as they do not without. I tick off the days on the menu of two weeks of dinners make between trips to the grocery store. I enjoy cooking perhaps more than I did before the pandemic and look forward to doing so most afternoons. My culinary prowess is easily double that of this time last year. I exercise outside and resent those days where gloomy weather abridges this. I am not writing as much as I expected but forgive that as a symptom of the world in which I continue to find myself. Amber is finishing up her semester, which has given her a direction that will stop in another week. After that, she will have little compelling to do between days that she must work.

I have been feeling anxious and having intrusive thoughts for the last few days, which I have so far been able to chide away. Is my brain understimulated and trying to make its own entertainment? Nothing much in my orbit has or can change, so it cannot be an external stimulus.

This is eroding weaker aspects of my personality. My voice has lost some affectation, drained of a slurring looseness and a childlike timbre around Amber to match her own. Without the influence of my students, my speech is more formal and playful because I do not have to code-switch for them. In short, I have only Amber to mimic now and I know I do not sound like her. I've always tailored how I spoke to my audience without conscious intention. I am also now annoyed when I return to weak linguistic habits. I do miss being around other people enough that my brain accommodates them I am out of practice.

For a writer, I am dependent on other people for content. With friends and family around, I can have experiences worth chronicling. Otherwise, I am detailing the mundanity of buying groceries or circling my own thoughts, likely less interesting to read than to write. (I must write. No one is likely as compelled to read, I hope.)

I'm surprised that I have dealt this well with a lack of socializing. I have bristled against it most other times in my life. Maybe the degree to which I am copacetic is owning to a lack of fearing missing out. There is nothing on which I am missing out. Everything social remains closed. Once things resume--whenever that happens--I expect I will feel differently.

I will be bothered when I have a tempting invitation and must decline for fear of infection. The state opening will not mean that it is safe for us to be out but that the intensive care unit has room for us. We will remain masked and distant for much longer. I expect to remain skittish through Christmas, but we will learn to accommodate.

I now understand better those people in old novels for whom seeing a friend was close to an ordeal, to whom a trip to another city was a reason for intense preparations and excitement. Imagining going to a restaurant or on a holiday seems improbable and luxurious. In watching things filmed before COVID, I am nervous at the people packing together and touching surfaces without care. This will come again sometime, but my reservations with it will not abate as readily.

I know Amber will be gun-shy. I will have to trust her discomfort to guide us so that I do not rush ahead to my doom because the quarantine has made me antsy.

Until we have a vaccine readily available, we cannot recover as a society. The highest echelons of American government seem to work against this, instead wanting a soundbite when the brave and hard thing to do is to take the political hit and save the nation. "Saving the nations" is obviously not calling to insurrection against governors for following federal orders or encouraging the spread because you are short-sighted and think wearing a mask makes you look foolish. There are far bigger issues than personal vanity or contempt at play, not that one would know it from the news.

I have a variety of masks. I have shifted my life and goals around far beyond what I imagined I would ever have to. Amber suggested that we ought to have a year of dry food socked away, an act that would be close to impossible at this point. It does account for why I can no longer buy soup or rice at the grocery store. There are reports that the distribution lines to get meat to us may fail, but they have not yet. Amber and I do not have the personal infrastructure to store more than fifteen or so pounds of meat, which I never before had any occasion to consider. (We live near farms. Though they may jack up the prices as demand increases, they will continue having animals.)

Owing to writing Flies to Wanton Boys, I am learned on the Swine Flu of 1918, even having given talks where I joke it may return. I did not expect or prepare for that to happen in my lifetime. I invested too much unspoken faith that society would not be permitted to come to such a precarious place.

Soon in Xenology: Probably more about COVID-19, since, you know, the world is ending and everything.

last watched: Fruits Basket
reading: Passport to Magonia