Tag: 05 26

The week is moving along fast now. The memory of yesterday is a blur, and this makes me feel as if it were a blur when I lived it, though I know that is probably not true. Sometimes our memory of a time feels is different from how a time felt when we lived it and the less we pay attention, the less we find to hold on to, the less mindful we are, the greater and greater the difference.

Today will feel different tomorrow than it does today.

Or, I hope so anyway. It been a long day of steep highs and lows, good news and bad news, celebrations and a hard future to plan for, and all of which I found overwhelming. I coped the best I could. I talked myself down from panic and let myself feel my joys fully. I faced my failures and allowed myself my successes.

I made it through it all today and sitting here at the kitchen table, enjoying a belly full of Pad Thai and a cool breeze that I like to think blew down straight from the peak of Mount Evans, through the city and in through my open windows with the sole purpose of cooling and calming me, I’m looking back and doing the math. I’m adding up the good and the bad, those successes and failures, the worries and joys, and it seems it’s all coming out even in the end.

A lot may have changed since I woke up this morning, but nearly all of it was horizontal. All in all, I’ve come back to the same me I was at daybreak.

The hardest part has been nearing it alone. My wife is off house sitting and though she isn’t far away and we still text and call throughout the day the same as we always do, not having her physically present leaves me feeling isolated and lonely.

Without her here I don’t know where to put my emotions, except on the page I suppose, but the page can only give back what is given. It can’t change anything. Yes, I can get the emotions out but with nothing to replace them with, they just keep growing back. This is only a prolonging, not a cure.

Luckily, in addition to words, there are chores, and pets, and podcasts, all of which are very good distractions, and by the time it starts getting dark outside and I’m crawling into bed, I hope to be too tired to let the day’s events run for long inside my head.

For the second time in less than a week they have shut the water off at my workplace and I have opted to go home early. I just don’t feel comfortable being there when I know I won’t be able to wash my hands as often and neither will my coworkers. It worked out great anyway because I needed to head to our west location free Covid-19 infection and antibody testing was being offered.

Before the shut down my wife had a nasty respiratory infection. I didn’t think much of it at the time, even though her symptoms were pretty bad. Now I wonder if she had a milder version. It’s possible, and it’s possible I was asymptomatic after being exposed. It’s much more possible she had a more common infection, and I didn’t get sick because we were careful to keep her in another part of the house and to disinfect high-touch areas even then.

Either way, I would like the peace of mind of knowing whether I may have any immunity or not, and whether others may have been put at risk or not.

I was home in time for lunch and spent the afternoon trying my best not to take a nap. It helped to stay at the desk, to make a list of the things I needed to do, and to have my wife sit across from me and work on her own projects to motivate me. I still have hours left to fill before bed time but as long as I stay well away from the couch or the bed I should be fine.

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Going back to work means having less time in the morning to check the news or keep up with social media. After lunch I logged into Twitter and was quickly overwhelmed. I’d already heard about the confrontation in Central Park, but the stories seemed to have reached every corner of the internet, and then I saw the video of George Floyd being restrained by police officers. It hurt to watch. I’m still hurting. With everything that’s going on, you’d think the world would be coming together, but instead I only see more and more hate every day.

It isn’t just these incidents. The videos of protesters calling for us to accept more death and of essential workers and concerned citizens being spit and coughed on is weighing on me too. This amount of hurt only brings more hurt because every time we hurt one, we hurt the whole and when we kill one we kill a part of the whole we can never bring back. I wish more people knew that.