COVID-19: A Retelling of Now

 

The one about home

I wake up solely by the light of sunrise
because I can’t afford blinds.
The furniture in my house has a past life
that I can only glean
from the areas where the seats sag
and the edges fray.

It’s student life in an apartment
not big enough to have the toaster in the kitchen
(it’s on the living room side table)
but I don’t have enough time to care.
The maintenance man came two months ago
to fix the leaky ceiling,
but I’m still dabbing up droplets
before they have the chance to mold the carpet.
It’s what it feels like to not be valued by a landlord.
It’s in the sound of quarters rattling in the jar
on the passenger seat on the way to the laundromat.
It’s in my roommate moving home because,
one morning, he woke up and his wall was covered with ants.
It’s in the smell of a neighbor’s dinner cooking on one side
and the sound of a neighbor singing on the other.
A place I don’t own, but for now, it owns me.

I used try to milk each day
of every minute it has to offer.
Work through lunch break.
Homework while cooking dinner with one hand.
Listen to an audio textbook
while washing the dishes, taking a shower,
wiping down the walls.
I saw less of this place then.

How intriguing it is that
so many professors have stepped up
to give students any reason to turn in work late,
or simply not do any at all—
they understand that these are hard times.
I wonder why so many
did not understand before.
Surely a worldwide pandemic
is not the only time there can be
an illness in the family,
or financial strife,
or a time-consuming job,
or home insecurity…
but somehow letting that impact higher education
was never permitted until this year.
Our tragedies are only valid
if they are common with their own.

These thoughts are irrelevant.
These are thoughts only the unpainted walls hear—
what would be called exposed brick in an upscale neighborhood—
and only come from living in a place
that has no life to give.
I think we all need to live in a shitty apartment at some point
to humble ourselves.
It has been a year and I am not humble.
I am just bitter.

 

The one about Jessica

She had already been rather alone for months.
N-95s at the ready,
for when friends would come
to bring her greasy chicken
and bread soft enough for her mouth to chew.
She was attached to the place, anyway,
like there was an octopus suctioned to her back,
eight skinny arms reaching
through the gap in her hospital gown
into the holes in her skin.
ticking
clicking
never a moment of silence,
just an eternity of solitude.

Now the visitors are stopped at the doors.
No deliveries can be made up to the 17th floor,
and I wonder how clearly she can see me
when I wave from the sidewalk,
because I can’t tell which window is hers and
I don’t know if she’s looking in the right place.

When we first visited,
before the doors were shut,
we learned that they take away flowers.
They take a photo of them
down at the front desk,
print it out sideways on
an 8 x 10 sheet of paper
and toss the flowers away.
She has not tasted the honeyed breath of outside
in too long.

It is sterile. She is safe.
Physically, that is.
But when you don’t have the strength
to entertain yourself,
when your mind is too occupied
for the positive thinking bullshit
they always recommend,
perhaps she isn’t all that well.
And I can do nothing about that.

 

The funny one

So I evaluated my houseplants’ personalities today,
and I must say I am not impressed.
I appreciate the company they’ve been giving me,
and my golden pothos cracks some good jokes that really get me going,
but, by God, some of them are so needy.
I watered my succulents to their exact specifications,
and I bought them their own sun that I screwed into a floor lamp,
but they’re still browning and dropping leaves like they don’t want the life I’ve given them.
Do not drop them like they’re hot, you cursed cactus,
they’re not hot, they’re in a perfectly temperature-controlled environment,
and I don’t know where you learned to be so dependent
because it certainly wasn’t from your mother.

Every day at noon I eat lunch at the same desk I’ve been working at
(no, I cannot separate my workspace from my living space—
it’s called living in a cheap apartment—but thank you)
And I scroll through Instagram to see what’s going on
in everyone else’s homes.
Celebrities are more relatable than ever.
Our peerless idols, pumping inspiration
through songs about if there’s no heaven
to comfort us in a time of death.
Their makeupless faces remind me that I, too,
can remain below average even after plastic surgery.

Give us this day our daily headlines
to nourish us, to supply our fear
with pessimism and our hope
with some gosh-darn realism.
I cannot take it.
I turn it to Fox News for comedic relief.

I went to the store for the first time this month
to pick up ingredients for a new recipe I was going to try
but—and this has never happened—I got lazy
while still at the store and decided to scrap the list
and just buy a bag of frozen chicken nuggets instead.
Dinner for a week.

My mother called that evening, worried about me living alone.
I do not understand her concern.
I am thriving.

 

The sad one

My own voice bouncing back at me from the cold walls
like the bottom of a well.
The same breath swirling in and out of my mouth,
my clothes pooling around me like water.
Echo, slick, cold close air—
the feelings of company.
Head bowed in prayer for
the other side of the curve
that I can picture even less
than how the sun shone yesterday.

Dreaming of white against black
in a dimly lit room—
not this one—
in a silence that is comforting,
in an embrace that is warm
and not my own,
in a moment I had planned since
I was a little girl sewing chunky white fabric
at my grandmother’s old Singer.
Moments fade even when
they haven’t happened yet.

Funny how I can no longer bring myself
to do anything.
Maybe it’s because now
I have the ability to do nothing.
No, I do not like that option.
That would mean that, before,
I was just too busy to be depressed.

It is all the same.
You, me, the same ten fucking objects
I look at every day,
nothing else.
There is nothing else.
When the day’s fires cool and
I am still looking east, I am reminded
I could stop existing in this moment
and no one would know.

 

The one about the world

Words. Same headline in 27 languages.
Voices of brass and flesh
from windows, balconies, porches.
A designated time for cheering,
the rest left to fear.
The sweet perfume of another life
becoming less familiar than a
childhood dream-memory.

Wisdom. This is not what it will take
to teach us that we are all the same.
Arbitrary boundaries remain
for discussion, debate, dissent.
We fully believe that this has revealed
nothing about ourselves and
everything about the world.

Blame. It has to go somewhere.
It floats through the streets,
lingering with disappearing smog
and the same safe sounds of bird calls.
The wind whips it westward
to hang over the very heads of those
that were killed for trying to warn us.
We are ruthless.
We strive for anger in the times
that cry out for forgiveness.

Grief. The Earth is grieving.
The soil that was once beneath our feet
is beginning to stretch and breathe,
its children starting to wander,
to mourn their losses, and recover.
Hope is translated in front of our eyes
and gifted between untouched hands.
There will be light to come of this.
The long night does not prove
the inexistence of the sun.
We have gotten this far,
almost together.
Grief teaches.
We are learning.

 

The one of what I’ve learned

1. I know how to chart the angles
of the sun through my window
with each passing hour:
the leaning shadows across my carpet,
the minute it bathes my desk,
the moment when each memory
along the shelf will be warm to the touch,
full of life as it hasn’t been in years.
I understand, now,
the great triumph it was
for the ancients to chart the stars.

2. I should no longer reject clichés.
We are not promised tomorrow.
I know this now.

3. The precision of a paintbrush
does not matter when working
with watercolors.
The paint goes where it wants,
its own conception of correctness.
The shades always look even
until the water dries
and the harsh lines return.
Somehow, it looks better like that.

4. Fear dissolves with time.
In the beginning I’d go downstairs
and check to make sure
the door was bolted and chained
and then I’d go back up to sleep
and then I’d go back down and check
and then I’d go back up to sleep
and then I’d go back down to check
and then
.
Now, I look once before flicking off the light.
And I am okay.

5. You do not start a puzzle
by assembling the main image.
You start with the very edges,
the ridged fringes that are
easiest to distinguish not by their color,
but their shape.
And then you find where everything goes
in the background. The soft parts,
the parts that are somehow not in focus.
A focal point is not always
what is most important.

6. I have not learned,
but I am learning,
to be okay with myself.
With my knotted thoughts and
the works of my hands and
the past I’ve painted with too many colors
until it was mud brown.
I was never meant
to pull the sun below the horizon
and tell the world it is night.
I am worth something no matter how small
my ripples in eternity will be.

Brittany Mosley is a recent graduate of the Ohio State University with a degree in English. She worked as a reader for The Journal, Ohio State’s award-winning literary journal, and is a freelance writer and journalist for Columbus and the surrounding communities. Her work has appeared in Curieux Academic Journal, but this is her first publication of poetry.