I write and work. I step outside and look at the sky. Sometimes I go for an ugly run. I make phone calls. I tend this journal. Repeat.
I remember watching the darkness in my bedroom when I was small, hypnotized by grey-pink flecks while I waited for sleep.
Maybe we’ll have a vaccine soon. Maybe the president will poison himself. Things can go either way these days.
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.
