The Chinese takeout spots along First Avenue have pulled up their metal shutters. The florist is open.
We might remember crouching on the sidewalk, frantically trying to gather the teeth falling from our mouths—not the circumstances that led us there.
We spent a few hours in the park because it’s almost possible to forget this pandemic while hiding in the grass beneath a tree.
An otherworldly landscape of alkaline and soda towers surrounded flat waters without a single ripple.
I’m writing these things down tonight because I want to look back in a few months and see if any of these dire predictions came true.
Someone down the hall has been practicing “New York, New York” on their piano for the past hour.
The triggers for fear are largely universal: loud noises, fast-moving objects, and the sudden loss of orientation. The loss of orientation has been sudden this year.
I find solace in these instructions from Epictetus: do not say something is lost, only that it is returned.
Time feels like an increasingly fictional concept as these weeks and months bleed into one very long day.
“I will create a world from the past,” she said, and she painted an audience on the walls and danced for them every Saturday night.
“Everything’s a mystery and I’m just another small part of it,” said a woman at a gas station in Barstow.
It’s becoming a nightly habit: scrolling through desert scenery while fantasizing about horizons, speed, and possibilities.
People keep talking about a return to “normal,” as if there’s such a thing.
My grandmother was tradition personified, a west side Polish Catholic who served Saturday night dinners of kielbasa and fried smelt.
There are advertisements on street corners and bus stops for events that will never occur.
