Balanced

 Just before the vernal equinox this year, I left my office, and aside from a few trips to tidy up and retrieve lost items, I never went back.

I have, for all intents and purposes, been in a quarantine holding pattern for the entirety of what we in the Northern Hemisphere call the 'light half' of the year.  Because I live somewhere the sun is not a friend so much as an ever-present scorching eye in the sky, the light half of the year is when I rest, recover, and rebuild my energy.  So, the fact that I haven't really been out and about, that most of my activity has been furtive neighborhood walks in my pajamas after midnight, isn't as much of a departure as it might otherwise be.

Six months in, my office is a complicated arrangement of laptops and monitors in a room I set up primarily to support my own creative pursuits with the side benefit of 'maybe working from home one day a week most weeks'.  I'm in here eight hours a day most weekdays, plus the evenings and weekends for those creative pursuits.  My co-workers, with whom I shared a small office full of laughter and conversation, are five rectangular windows containing talking heads I see when the shared calendar allows us to schedule a meeting.

My family is a collection of text messages and phone calls, quick updates 'to check in' and pass on birthday greetings or noteworthy events.

My friends are another set of talking heads in rectangular windows -- and a long scrolling social media window into their gardens, home bakeries, home offices, ad hoc educational support centers, bird feeders, and pets' lives.

And their rage.  Oh, their rage and their fear and their politics and their hopelessness and their anxieties and their crushing, constant, overwhelming despair that this may not ever be allowed to get better.  That we will die without hugging someone we love that one last time.  That we'll survive this, only to emerge into a decimated social landscape, with some fraction of our population gone or forever changed by it.

I find myself increasingly frustrated with the holding pattern.  So many people, torn between "keep everything as close to normal as you can," and "Just collapse whenever it becomes too much," seesaw back and forth between self-care and self-sabotage without ever stopping to sit with the moment we are all in.  In one day, the same person might say to the world, "Everything we know is dead or dying and cannot be saved," and "Hold faith in a bright new future we can build together," and "Everyone who doesn't think like me is a stupid hateful asshole who should die in a fire," and in the moment of speaking each of these things every word is true.  They're not even mutually exclusive, if you can accept that it's possible to love the world and those around you and to hope for a brighter day coming even while you feel helpless, impotent rage at the people who don't.

We're self-soothing with hope, which is not necessarily a bad thing unless that hope has paralysed you because it cannot possibly yet be realised.

In the aftertimes, we'll have a feast together, laughter echoing across raised glasses.

In the aftertimes, we'll gather whenever and wherever we like, without that nagging worry that maybe WE are the asymptomatic carrier bringing plague with the potato salad.

In the aftertimes we'll never again take for granted the ability to populate our lives and our houses with loved ones.

In the aftertimes, we'll travel, oh how far we'll travel, even if we have never been more than forty miles from home, we'll get on a plane and see another continent just because we want to.

In the aftertimes we'll smile at one another and know it.

But here, standing in the space of the equinox, standing in the balance between the halcyon beforetimes and the shimmering aftertimes, in this timeless place that has stretched out as the world moved halfway through its orbit, what am I waiting for?

As night hangs equal to day, as we begin the time of year when we shine the brightest against the long winter, what will I do in the meantime?