Questions from a Quiet Place

I took my sweet ass time making my way back to this place. I always thought I’d report back here when I had something much more interesting to say, when I’d taken the time to post something of high quality for you to enjoy in my little piece of digital real estate.

But I let time pass, and this blank virtual space has been covered in a thick blanket of dust as I ran around and lived my life without bothering to drop off any of my thoughts into this empty room.

Then work stopped. And the world stopped. And every human being was told to retreat to their homes at once.

So here I am, returning to this big white room. I’ve shut the door behind me, flipped on the lights, and let out a small “hello?” only to have the emptiness echo it back to me. Maybe this place will feel more like home once I’ve begun to unpack these thoughts and ideas I’ve been collecting and lugging around with me all this time.

For starters, I’ll lay out this question:

If you knew ahead of time that this dreadful virus was going to dominate our lives, and were allowed to spend your last moments with only one person before submitting to this long and weary isolation- who would it be?

Who is the last face that you want your eyes to memorize the landscape of? Whose laugh is it that you would want to waltz into your ears and reverberate through the halls of your heart? Whose touch is the last to leave an imprint on your skin, before intimacy becomes a luxury the world can no longer afford?

I cannot tell you with certainty who I would ask for in that last hour. And I suppose it might be a waste of time to spend too long thinking on that, because it’s far too late.

We’re here now. Doors shut. Holed up. Alone, with nothing much besides our thoughts and worries to keep us occupied. After a week of quarantine, I can tell you that the what-if’s and could-have-been’s, while being some of the loudest of thoughts, make terrible company in these trying times.

To make it through this, it’s maybe better to not pay them too much attention. While the duration of this bleak season is unknown, it shares one certainty with every other thing in this world: it will meet its end.

So for when this ends, a question:

When we are all free again, and we’ve opened our doors, passed the boundary lines of our front porches, and fully emerge from lengthy solitude to enter back into the world we once knew- who is the first person you would like to see again?

Whose eyes are the ones that will meet yours and welcome you home? Whose laugh is it you long to hear, that sounds just like the crackle from a record player right before your favorite song plays? Whose touch will you reach out for, reducing six feet of once mandatory distance

to mere inches,

to millimeters, to

nothing?

I cannot tell you the answer to that question either, to be frank. One could argue that whoever is the answer to this question holds a more important role than whoever is the answer to the first I posed. And that maybe this question is a better companion to your lonely nights in this quiet place. Even if this person’s identity remains a mystery, it is a reminder that there is hope and warmth waiting on the other side of this.

Til then, stay safe and stay sane. I’ll be here, trying to make myself at home.