349 Days

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 Yesterday J. did the math (i.e., ask Siri) and figured that we've been in quarantine for 349 days. My Zoom profile pic is from March 13, 2020, and my hair is short, I am wearing makeup, I look...well, a hell of a lot younger. Though none of us really knew what lay ahead of us, and all of us were still alive then, I felt on the precipice of something. Though two weeks seemed a long time to pause the world. Then a month. Then here we are at the edge again. 

In this almost-year we have had fires that blotted out the sun for days, made necessary the wearing of a  precious N95 mask the only way I could go out to feed the chickens. We've had clouds of tear gas and weeks upon weeks of protests, police brutality. I've been to family court twice (I'm blowing this all out of proportion! etc etc). This is all in the tail end year of the Orange Dictator's rule, and then came the Insurrection. We are a week past a snowstorm to end all snowstorms, here and across the country and most everyone in Portland has power back, trees once shattered are stacked in logs along the roadside. I've collected unemployment for the first time in my life (I know; I am deeply privileged and lucky this way). We've grown our flock of chickens to four, raised a baby from a little peep. J and I have flown cross-country four times, sixteen flights. I have lost friends, friends have lost family. There are vaccines, but they are hard to come by. 

Since January I have awakened with the sunrise and written down every bird I see as the sun smears its way above Mt. Tabor. I have struggled--I know, so many of us have--to stay in my body, to not run until I bleed or puke, to not starve myself down to a hollow bone. I do not know if I am succeeding.  I have learned, or re-learned, a recital's length of arias and art songs that I have no idea if I will ever sing for anyone but R., J, D and the cats. I have watched the chickens peck a rat to death. I have walked the mile circumference of our little neighborhood 349 days, give or take a few. I have taken J. out to parking lots to teach him to drive, my boy who is my best friend, with whom I discuss politics and gender essentialism and music and fashion and psychology as we slowly walk alongside the Olden Dog. I have baked bread and birthday cakes and gotten drunk on martinis and cheap wine and bought overalls and jumpsuits and sometimes can't get out of my pajamas at all. 

I run every day that I can. I read, or don't read, because my head feels empty, like a stiff hot wind is blowing, like I have become a tumbleweed, a maple seed, a blown-out dandelion.

I am lonely. We are all lonely. The air smells like rain and cedar and woodsmoke. Exhaust from the empty bus on Glisan rattling away into the middle distance.

Here we are, still in the middle of the middle of the middle of the middle of it. I love you. 

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