Emerging
I’ve been fully vaccinated for a month now. It’s pretty great. I had my first professional hair cut in 15 months. I got a massage. I went to the dentist. I’ve been to the gym enough to realize that the combination to my lock is never going to just come back to me. I’ve had hot, crispy fried food. We did our level best to support the restaurants we couldn’t visit, but fried food just isn't the same out of a takeout container.
Photo by author, who subsequently ate all this deliciousness
My husband and I were enjoying some hot, crispy fried seafood and drinking beer when I realized I had lost my favorite bookstore. I like a lot of bookstores, and I’ve never been amazing at spatial relations. So it could be that the bookstore has always been a block that way. Or that way. Or that this bar is not where I think it is. “Where is the bookstore?” I say to my husband. He looks at the vacant building in front of us with surprise. “Uh oh.”
There have been incalculable losses during the pandemic. In the midst of all this shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, each small loss still has its own sting. Starbucks is gone. Yes, of course there are more Starbucks on the other side of town. Before I was married, though, I used to go to the closed one and drink coffee and read the New York Times. I don’t even know how we’ll tell the children that Izzy’s Pizza is gone. And there’s still thirteen years before we would have been eligible for the senior discount we were so looking forward to.
I am emerging into a changed community. The kids are back in school, but there are no after school activities. I work, but I still have no commute. The kids aren’t vaccinated, so we haven’t even discovered yet which of our former favorite haunts didn’t make it through the last year. Fifth grade field day will be virtual (read: in my living room) this year. There have been no birthday parties, no science fairs, no end of school-year celebrations.
The bookstore had moved to a smaller location. I went in. I smelled the books through my mask. I spent too much money. I loved it. It feels good to be back—even to this changed world. The vaccines that showed up quicker than anyone expected turn COVID-19 into a cold you probably won’t get. And they return us to fried food, bookstores, and our community.