Tag coronavirus

This Is Fucked Up

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By Alex Finley

They had way more style during the bubonic plague, but it was pretty fucked up, too.

You ever stop and look around and just say, wow, this is really fucked up?

That’s how I spend about ninety percent of my time now, when I’m not washing my hands or disinfecting light switches. It’s weird, isn’t it? How quickly dystopia befell us? And it’s really fucked up, right?

Remember six weeks ago, when we used to be able to make plans? Remember how fucking glorious that was? Hey, you got summer plans? You planning to go to the gym later? What are your weekend plans? Let’s plan to see each other! Remember that? Remember when the future existed?

Ah, having a future to plan. What a luxury that was. 

The only thing my family and I plan now is meals. Our lunch conversation is about what we will make for dinner. That’s it. We can’t get any further into the future than that. 

We have no idea what the future will be like, or when it will begin. When will we be able to travel farther than the grocery store? When will we see our friends in person, rather than waving from a screen? More than the physical confinement, we struggle with this mental confinement. This constant holding pattern. Who can focus? Who can start new projects? Who can finish old ones? Will they matter anymore? Will projects from a few weeks ago be relevant or relatable in a post-coronavirus world? 

And what till that future look like? Will we ever touch each other again? See each others’ smiles? Or is our future a staggered line of people in masks standing six feet apart? 

I’ve had friends send me selfies in their new masks. I’ve seen pictures proudly posted on Instagram and Pinterest to show off pink paisley homemade masks, finely stitched, pandemic oeuvres. 

People, making our own masks in order not to die is not cute. It’s not normal. It’s really fucked up.

My husband found masks in a shop recently and returned home triumphant. “I found masks!” he yelled from the front hallway that is now our airlock, where we peel off any potentially contaminated clothing and drop shopping bags to be hosed down with disinfectant. I opened the packet. They were sew-it-yourself masks. My mother sewed her own wedding dress. This is not a talent she passed down to me. But, I mean, I had time, right?

So, I sewed my own mask. 

Remember the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas, whose main character has a baseball head with a mouth that looks like it was sewn by a three-year-old? That’s my mask. Rudimentary stitches in various thread colors that would make Frankenstein tell me not to quit my day job. It sags funny around my cheeks, kind of like I shoved an airplane vomit bag over my nose, mouth, and chin and secured it with some rubber bands around my ears. It looks like a horse’s feed bag. I could carry snacks in there.

This is most definitely not my mask.

But again, how fucked up is it that I have to wear hazmat gear to go to the grocery store in the first place? 

I live in a city, so our groceries are small, and even though they limit how many people can be inside at once, it’s a fucking mess in there, all of us performing a Covid-19 ballet. Imagine a Swan Lake pas de deux, if the swans feared avian flu. Someone steps toward me, and I leap back, pinning myself against the shelf before spinning around to turn my head away from him. I duck under an arm and sidestep an employee stocking wine (thank god!) before pulling back into an aisle, where an old woman twirls and moves away, leading a young man to waltz around her through a narrow aisle, where he meets a young woman who dances backwards as he approaches. We need six-feet-wide tutus to mark our space. We’re probably all smiling apologetically as we hop past one another, but who can tell given that we’re all wearing our stupid fucking masks.

But we’re all in this together, right?

You know those uplifting videos that were circulating when this dystopia started? How we were all keeping each others’ spirits up by singing opera from the window or playing piano from our balconies? So inspiring, being together alone.

None of those people are my neighbors. Not a single one of my neighbors has talent. 

One guy sat on his balcony and clipped his nails. That’s what we’ve got.

I’m not judging. I’ve been completely useless. I haven’t learned calculus or written a best-selling novel or 3-D printed a ventilator I invented. My family doesn’t want to sit together, let alone sing a funny rendition of Les Miserables together. We have the time for everything, but the patience for nothing. My sixteen-year-old son has not left the house in more than a month. The kid should be hanging out being stupid with his friends and figuring out who he is, not listening to his mother say ridiculous things like, “Hey, guess who I just ran into in the kitchen? Your dad!” We’re hilarious, but I understand when he says he never wants to see his parents again once this lockdown ends. 

When it ends. Sometime. In a future we can’t yet conceive.

Pretty fucked up, right?

The View From Spain

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aerial photography of high rise buildings

Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric on Pexels.com

By Alex Finley

Growing up, my school was only ever canceled for snowstorms.

My son has had school canceled for snowstorms, windstorms, floods, an attempted coup, political protests, and now a pandemic.

My family and I moved to Barcelona from Rome last summer. It has been surreal and agonizing to watch my former home fall to the virus, while people in my new home carried on with their regular lives, somehow thinking Spain would be different than Italy. As Spain woke up to the crisis and slowly rolled its lockdown regulations into place, I watched the United States, where I am from, somehow think it would defy the odds.

My husband and I have had flashbacks to 9/11. Then, our apartment in Washington DC looked out on the flight pattern leading into National Airport. Before that tragic day, we would sit on our balcony and watch the planes come in, two minutes apart. After, we noticed the absence. The sky was empty.

Unlike then, there are no burning buildings now. There is no snowstorm. No hurricane. No shooting in the streets, as during an attempted coup we experienced. We don’t see the threat. We don’t see inside the hospital five blocks from our new home, where Barcelona’s first coronavirus patient was admitted less than a month ago. We don’t see the desperation on the doctors’ faces as they must choose who lives and who dies. We don’t see the hotels being converted into hospitals in Madrid. We don’t see the patients suffocating, wanting to rip tubes out of their own throats. But as we knew when those planes hit, we know the world is about to change.

It comes like a wave. You know, conceptually, that it is coming. Each day, you hear the tallies of infections and deaths. But you cannot comprehend the reality of what this pandemic will entail, even for those who manage not to get sick. And when it hits, it hits fast, crashing down on society.

First, my son’s soccer training was canceled. Then there were rumors about school closing the following week. Why wait five more days, if you know there is a threat? My husband and I discussed keeping our son home. In the end, the government made the decision to close schools the following day, much to my relief.

I was angry at the Spanish government for dawdling. Why did Spain think it would be different than Italy? With a full week of evidence and data out of Italy, Spain bickered and devolved into political battles. On March 8, the government encouraged everyone to go out in the streets to celebrate Women’s Day. Thousands marched in Madrid, Barcelona, and across Spain. One week later, we were in lockdown, the health care system cracking under the burden.

Throughout each day, we track the numbers. Less than a week before I wrote this, we were at fewer than 2,000 cases. Within two days, it had nearly doubled. When I wrote this a week ago, we had more than 9,000. And now as I edit it, we have more than 30,000. I check in on our elderly neighbors, who are afraid to open the door. They speak to me from a window. Going food shopping or taking out the trash is a respite from being cooped up in the apartment. We joke with our friends that we plan to borrow their dog, since walking pets is one of the few legitimate reasons to go outside. At least one person ran an advertisement offering to rent his dog for this purpose. These dogs are going to be exhausted.

Sometimes we watch a movie or exercise or dance in the kitchen. For a glorious period, everything feels normal. Then the movie ends and we come back to reality. Again, it is the absence that is most striking. The silence outside. The absence of life and energy in this normally vibrant city. We can’t leave our house and a war is being fought just up the street at the hospital.

Each night, we join the entire city, all of us on our terraces or hanging out our windows, to applaud the health care workers. We only moved here a few months ago. I don’t know the woman in the bathrobe on the terrace below me, or the young girls in yoga clothes on the rooftop across, or the young man banging on a pot from the next building over. But in that moment, we are one community. We are together. We are part of something bigger than ourselves. I wonder if the doctors and nurses five blocks away hear us. I hope so.

I understand that no one in the United States understands. We didn’t either, despite what we saw in Italy. But it is real, and it is coming.

My husband and I have done crises. Too many, in different countries. Once our son was born, we always had in place an emergency plan for him in case something were to happen to us. When I was working for the CIA in Europe and my son was a toddler, the Agency had a stream of intelligence suggesting terrorists were planning an attack in Europe, possibly in the city where we were. I remember the look on the face of the director of my son’s daycare. She thought I was crazy when I handed her the phone number of my parents in the United States. Just in case, I told her.

Now my son is old enough to take care of himself, to a point. We sat down the other day to discuss what to do if his father and I are in the hospital. We are in a new country. Who does he call? I showed him where his passport is, explained how to get money. How does he get to family in the United States? This is a discussion I had with my teenager, growing up in the time of Covid-19. I long for a simple snow day.