Pandemic Landscape

Yesterday I went into my closed library at the ghost town of City Hall. I was picking up my laptop for the telecommuting ahead. In all the YA dystopian reads I binged on during the Hunger Games craze, I never came across one that looked like the life I am living. We are living. Every last person on this earth, save the scientists in Antarctica. What a thought. The ultimate manifestation that life is truly stranger than fiction.

I open the doors covered in eye level signage with COVID in caps. The image reminds me of what I once heard an author say about how to write a horror story. "Begin with a basic, routine setting or scenario but add a small twist to it." Opening the doors to work - basic, routine. This small twist of signage. My seemingly slow weekday morning run, young neighbors getting out of their sedan in their driveway. Basic, routine. Their faces turn and I see the ominous surgical masks they wear. A small twist. Quiet streets - basic. During "rush hour" - a twist. People walking and running past each other but dodging 6 feet out when passing one another on the pavement. Basic, routine until it isn't.

What an impressive hook this would be for an author to begin their story with these vignettes. What kind of expository text or dialog would illuminate the events leading to a world like this? As a reader I certainly wouldn't expect it to only cover the course of the days/week that it seemed to all happen. What would Margaret Atwood do with this story? Actually, don't answer that question.

I walk past our bookdrop, blocked with bold letters telling people to keep their books home. I think of the virus that has changed everything being carried on something as innocuous as a book. In the library I see the Women's History month displays - "Spring Into a New Read" - all the lists I made a couple of weeks back to coax people into new parts of our library collection. Basic, routine - these tasks. Creating these displays to bring people through our doors, to connect with each other and these physical, shared objects. This physical gathering of people and resource sharing that I have spent years learning how to do in the name of community health is now the most toxic act I could take against the public. Small twist.

This is our shared paradox now - a compulsion to connect while remaining distant. We hole up in our bunkers. Authors read their books virtually, musicians share their music with online concerts, social networks abound. If we are the lucky privileged, delivery services can feasibly bring essential, and non-essential items. But even those with the most comfortable of circumstances are going through an interesting exercise of finding ways to bridge the emotional and mental needs with physical connection. Creating this sensory experience while always maintaining this gaping distance.

But so far my read on this story is dystopian, not apocalyptic. Our earth is still safe and though ravaged by many sins, there is miraculously a great space for the deepest connections we crave. And for those of us that are not seeing the worst of this pandemic, we can close the distance between us and the breathing life of an oak tree, the physical warmth within a shaft of sunlight, the sprawling release of any open outdoor space or the steadiness felt in the soft, natural unevenness of earth beneath our feet. And in those safe and legal acts, we are most certainly connected.

Though I panic and pray that this small twist is not our new normal, I also have a further ask of this story. I hope that the great conflict of narrative has a closing chapter of resolve. One where the characters not only save themselves but also restore what they now recognize as their greatest resource - one that has been here all along for our health - the natural spaces that they are given to safely and most wholly connect.