My wife and I are hunkered down for the virus. Sort of. I’m staying home, but she’s working at the small local store she’s managed since it opened fifteen years ago. It’s open. It’s deemed “essential.” Her store’s owner has been given a shot at survival and he’s taking it.
Because I’ve worked from home for years and my wife is working at the store, our life resembles what it was pre-Covid 19, except that she and her boss offer curbside service now, masks are required inside, and they wipe the place down after every customer, while she and I share an uneasy alliance. Roll the film noir stock.
INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
Wife enters. She and her husband timidly embrace, and then she exits to the bathroom and closes the door. Sound of faucet running.
When I consider our methodical hand scrubbing, the absurdly long stares we give doorknobs before we touch them, and the paranoid curiosity that arrives with every package left at our door, it feels like we’re living through The Walking Dead, except bleach has replaced machetes, and the heroic couple debates kissing. Yeah, kissing. Because while we share a kitchen, a bathroom, and our bed, kissing shares air and air can kill you. So with every kiss comes images of people who entered her store, who wore pointless surgical masks or pulled their K95s beneath their noses when out of sight or lifted them to speak before my wife could tell them — or not — to place the masks back over their mouths. At the end of the day, did she get out of the store “clean” or is she simply asymptomatic? “What do you mean, you don’t feel well? What’s wrong?” My feet feel like they’re dangling off the deep end.
We now kiss like strangers before we drift to sleep amid the gunfire of exhaling, snoring, and coughing just inches away from each other, and we hope their bullets won’t hit us in our sleep. We’re doing what we can to remain safe. But we’re married with bills.
‘What we can,” though, doesn’t feel like enough. Because I’m searching for time.
I spoke with Mom tonight. We’ve talked almost nightly for decades, but our calls feel more precious now because she’s ninety-eight and I’m a disabled middle-aged male; both of us are in Covid-19’s crosshairs. But my priority is my life, not hers, and not because I’m a dick, but because a mother shouldn’t stand over her only son’s grave, not after she put so much effort into keeping him alive.
Daddy died 25 years ago. That’s when I inherited a singular job: become healthier. I began swimming, eating organically, protecting my life, because I have to outlive her. By at least one minute.
But years pass and habits change, and I am now a mother’s child who wishes that as an adult I had continued eating better, had kept on exercising, had traded screen light for sunlight. To gain just that minute.
But life…
I met someone, settled in, became lazy and careless, rediscovered doughnuts. How many minutes did that doughy goodness cost me? It matters now.
My childhood was spent in hospitals, but I was rarely alone. I was frequently sad, but depression was denied root. Because Mom was there. My mother did more than give me life. She saved it. I can’t destroy hers now by neglecting that gift.
Just one minute.
I missed grades 7-12. Illness. Yet ten years later, I graduated from a top tier university, married a woman far above my grade, started a surprisingly successful business. You know whose invisible hand supported me as I passed those mile markers. You know.
You can’t dismiss dark clouds nor anticipate the different forms they will take. They are that much bigger than we are. And that much smaller. Invisible to the naked eye. Microscopic.
It’s now left to us to manage our protection, to “stay in place,” to breathe less deeply until this machination of nature passes us by.
Tick. Tock.
I am in my fifties and never fathered children. I am an only child. My DNA is speeding down a wide two-laner toward an unavoidable end. No exits. A definitive final scene.
I’m okay with that.
But give me those final 60 seconds.