Day 24----
This feels inappropriate to say--it is inappropriate to say this. But also, I bet a lot of people think this way: I get some kind of reassurance from the fact that I'm experiencing this from the current epicenter. To know that this is the global worst right--it gives me mental significance to the incessant sirens and the ripples of anxiety that flow between the three of us here. Does that make sense? The three of us alone in the biggest city in the US. And yet, even looking out on the street below feels alone. Even living in the epicenter, I am not the epicenter. Everyday, as death counts rise and rise and rise, I realize more and more, exactly how few people I know.
The only person we still see who we know is Charlie the super and he doesn't even nod. He is always so busy sorting garbage across the street and helping Comcast employees or staring off into space with his insufficient mask dangling around his neck. He looks so scared. How does all this rest on him?? It's so unfair.
People keep posting guilt tripping statements about how what we do right now shows our true colors about --insert whatever cause they talk about normally-- and how easy it is to just do the safe thing but how we will be judged by how we helped during this time. Or how we did not. And all the while our mayor and governor and CDC say, "do not leave your home. Do not come in contact with anyone." And I worry about jesse's weird undiagnosed lung thing that may or may not exist but what if it did. And they say its not bad for kids but what if they find out later it is. And random people keep asking if I'm at risk because of my auto immune disease and I didn't think I was but it's unnerving being asked. And what if I help our neighbors and get them sick. But are these all just excuses?
I went out yesterday-- so empty but also so many essential workers. People still riding busses. Postal workers still taking contaminated mail, their counters taped over with plastic wrap to the ceiling but that does nothing if the person mailing something has sneezed in the last fifteen minutes before standing at their counter. Cops still helping scared, scurrying, masked people cross the street around abandoned street construction sites--how do you stay six feet away from someone who can't leave the middle of the cross walk??? And grocery store employees, not even paid a living wage, who suddenly find themselves essential workers... who live with elderly relatives because, again, they aren't paid a living wage. Photos of subway cars filled with minority, hourly workers float accusingly before our homebound eyes. How can I do nothing???? What can I do????
I desperately want to check in with our downstairs neighbors but I'm afraid that even a note will be contaminated and kill them. I want to apologize for our dance parties and stools made into strollers by a three year old and dragged relentlessly across their ceiling.
