I go about my daily rituals smoothly, calmly, ritually. The morning coffee, the care of plants, the walkout on the lawn barefoot in my nightdress that is a day dress so nobody knows. The sky is Baltic blue, the air is gentle on days between the blasts of heat. When I awaken without neck or head pain from deteriorating vertebrate in my neck I am immediately thankful.

What will this day bring? Who will I be in this meeting of my flesh, breath, hands moving among the minutes? What did I do yesterday or in the deep dark forgotten jungle amnesia of many yesterdays?

The marker is March 11th. That is the day I retreated and stayed hunkered down, bunkered down away from COVID. At first, I was finding a deeply tranquil way of living without the expectations or the gentle tugs from the calendar… tomorrow you will do this, or get in the car and travel across town.

It was becalmed and introverted. But for the first time, my love of the introverted existence was not a rebellion. I was not some motorcycle leather-clad rebel acting out ferociously against the constrictors that have been placed on me in my life.

We were all at home. we were all not gathering for an exchange of idle talk, breath, the agreement to burn up time in some meaningless circle of bodies. I was not going against any social mores.

And it was weird for me to experience that for the first time in my life because it meant I was no longer weird.

The second stage of gradual opening was when I felt most lost. The collective societal agreement was the same as if a drunken uncle had fallen face forward at a family celebration and broken the china, or the heritage crystal vase. We would all agree not to remember, not to have noticed. All around me I saw people taking the words “extend your bubble” to mean anything they desired to happen would happen.

Twenty-year-olds gathered close, yelling in one another’s faces. No one wore a mask. The walks that I took previously in a cityscape that appeared like the neutron bomb had been dropped were now sporting clusters of people who had decided that their bubble meant anyone that they had known for long enough.

People were past the building of a raft of toilet paper rolls and clinging to them as they left the stores and were now confident. The virus was not for them. They were young enough or bright enough, or energetic enough, or educated enough to be immune to its reach.

My personal reaction began to amp up. The more I saw people taking their children to crowded venues without protecting them with masks, the less I trusted others to act in a manner that would protect my loved ones.
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I reacted by digging my fox hole deeper. I stayed home more. I focused on my fitness, my wise eating, my gardening more. As much as I had an underlying desire to expand, to take risks, to send my novel out, to drive to another town for coffee… I found I just could not.

This feeling is not new for me. I have been in a car rolling off a highway. I have been in a car swirling around and around on ice smashing front and back in to the point where witnesses assumed we were dead inside. I have made a dreadful decision that took me ten years to recover myself.

I remember knowing as a small child that the wrong move, the wrong response would result in a beating that could break my bones. And these life experiences are coming to play in my response to COVID.

Always alert

The wrong decision, a step too far, acting out of some undisciplined urge to feel pleasure for a moment can be tragic. I know this.

So now I have been mostly cut off and isolated since March 11th. The bigger dreams, the underlying desires for a richer life are still there. But I live as if the floor were lava.

“Don’t you dare take the wrong step,” I say to myself

I live in a quiet that is monastic. But underneath there is fear. Underneath there is the aching realization that I depend on other people to make wise decisions. And it takes me back to the very heart of my woundedness.

“Who can I trust?” I find myself asking that.