returning, pt. iii

I missed last week because, as you may imagine, I had other things on my mind.

We were separated when the empire began to tear itself apart. She spent her days in the empire's heart, I'm told; every now and then I'd hear a story with her name in it. They loved her, there, as she tried her best to maintain the fragile peace, to give voice to the downtrodden. She was a champion of the people, a symbol of hope for people who otherwise would long have given into despair--at least, that's what the stories said. Sometimes I wondered if there weren't stories where she was the villain, confounding the peace, poisoning the minds of the populace with false hope and empty promises. But if those stories existed, they never found me out in the hinterlands. And just hearing her name made me smile.

Some days, I'll admit, I resented that she made pretty speeches while I lived by the sword--out this far from the heartlands, what peace and stability the empire had once offered had long since faded away. So the people of the hinterlands made their own peace, and when that was threatened, they turned to vagabonds and mercenaries like myself to make things right. It's possible some of them thought of me as a hero later, and I know many of those I crossed swords with were certain I was a villain. Some of them probably even told stories about me, but none of those stories seemed to travel.

It was years later when we reunited. She had, impossibly, won. At first I hoped that we could carry on as if neither of us carried those years with us, that we could be just as inseparable as before, be just as wonderful and impossible together as we had been. But neither of us could pretend the years hadn't happened. Neither of us could return to the people we were before.

We tried. Somehow it was worse that there was no hostility, not even any real friction, just this distance that neither of us knew how to bridge, growing wider with every passing day. In the end I packed up my things and slipped away in the night, for good this time. And I hope that someday she hears stories about me and finds it in her to smile.

scenes from a pandemic, pt. iii

Today was my first day back to work and, coincidentally, the first day Governor Inslee's stay at home order was in effect. The streets felt like nighttime streets. There was still traffic, but not much--one or two cars at a time at most; much more frequently just stretches of empty road. People on streets behave differently at night. There is no longer the assumption that a car might be coming at any time because there probably isn't; instead they simply rely on the fact that they'll probably see one coming if there is one. It felt like that. Downtown was the worst. In the U District, there were still plenty of people milling about, but downtown felt deserted.

I was given a little sheet of paper to give to the cops in case they harass me for being out, which is surreal. It doesn't look particularly official but it says where I work and that my work is considered an essential business and that, as such, it's essential that I be out there. I don't think it will be a problem, though--cyclists and joggers are out in force, especially on the multi-use bike trail I take home. With the exception of the occasional mask, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it doesn't seem like anyone on the trail is aware that the city has been shut down.

Business, as you can imagine, is very slow. Slower than it was two weeks ago, the last time I went to work, and slower, I'm told, than it was even yesterday, when the stay-at-home order was not yet in effect. The usual expectation in service jobs of trying to find something to do even if there are no customers was gone. The handful of customers we encountered seemed grateful that we were open--there are not many places downtown that have elected to keep their doors open, as it trns out.

Residential concierge desks downtown seem to have set up a little system where they tape off an area several feet away from the desk and ask you to stand behind the line when interacting with them. Like all of this, it feels strange. Just another reminder that whatever you thought of as normal is gone, now. The rules have changed.

At my first residential delivery of the day, there was a wedding going on in the lobby. A small gathering of people--four or five at most, maybe less. It was sweet, and sad, and strange: while the concierge asked me questions from a list about whether I was currently feverish or had recently been to China, someone else started trying to talk to me, telling me to wait so that I didn't interfere with the wedding. I stood aside until the bride had walked down the lobby to where her betrothed and the officiant waited.

That image will stick with me, I think. In many ways it captures the feeling of every interaction I had with people today. There is a profound sense of loss, of uncertainty, but people are doing their best to get by, to find little moments of joy where they can, to be kind to one another.

scenes from a pandemic, pt. ii

Last night, Governor Inslee ordered bars and restaurants to close, except for delivery and take-out; when I called out from work this morning, my store was still open; it's never been primarily a dine-in place, so I suppose the order won't make much more of a difference than the pandemic already has. (As for me: the mild cough lingers, the malaise/fever/whatever seems to have subsided. It feels kind of like the last day or two of a cold now.)

When this first started happening, I don't think I anticipated that one of the side-effects would be that my comrades working at restaurants and bars would be suddenly trying to navigate the bureaucracy of unemployment. My housemate, who works (or worked, I guess) as a cook at a restarant/bar, said that as he was trying to fill out the application online last night, the server crashed, presumably as food service workers across the state all tried to fill it out at the same time so they could make sure they could still pay their bills this month.

We will spend the duration of this crisis wondering if the measures that have been taken were too much, or if they were too little too late. Is the economic suffering caused by this measure worth the lives it might save? On some level, of course, that suffering would have happened with or without the measure, but for many, this will never be enough.  What are they planning to do when the order expires at the end of the month? Do they hope the crisis will be over by then?

The most important question, though: will they actually take measures to protect society's most vulnerable from the economic fallout of all this? Will they take measures to protect those workers who are still forced to go to work and interact with the public because their services are considered too essential to be shut down? Or will the interests of the ownership class prevail, and the underclass ultimately be left, as America is so fond of leaving them, to live or die by the whims of fate, protected only by a woefully inadequate social safety net?

COVID-19 will lay bare, has laid bare, the inherent cruelty of our society. I will leave it as an academic exercise for the reader whether this revelation will lead to any meaningful change towards a kinder world.

scenes from a pandemic, pt. i

I live in Seattle, the city where COVID-19 first touched down in the US. I work downtown as a bike messenger, doing food delivery, mainly to office workers. There isn't a nonpretentious way to say that this means that while I'm at work I have a finger on the pulse of the city, but I do. It's far from perfect--things that happen outside of my delivery area are usually off my radar, for instance--but I see and hear a lot. And when something noteworthy happens, people occasionally talk to me about it. The news cycle is happening quickly and I'm not going to try to replicate it or keep up to date, but I want to chronicle what I've seen and what's happening.

I'd been following the news for a while, because it's 2020 and everything bad that can happen will happen. Still, it felt distant as Governor Inslee declared an emergency--I knew that at some point I would probably get sick, that there would be runs on supplies, but it didn't feel real. Then, on March 4th, two days before I was supposed to go out of town on vacation, Amazon, a corporation with a massive percentage of the office space downtown and therefore a primary source of business, asked their employees to start working from home until the end of the month.

The day after that, downtown felt subdued. It wasn't as desolate as I expected, but traffic was lighter than usual, business was quite slow despite multiple coworkers being home sick. There was a sense of something big coming, but overall people seemed to be fairly cheerful about the whole thing. The reality of our situation, I think, had not set in.

Allergies were also quite bad that day. Bad enough that, worrying that the symptoms might be the onset of the virus, I cancelled my trip plans and stayed home for the time I had scheduled to take off. I didn't know what to expect when I returned to work the following Wednesday (the 11th of March). I returned to find that the company was slashing hours for employees across the board; sales were down to something like twenty percent of usual. Many of the restaurants I passed were closed indefinitely. The city had come to the realization that this was going to hurt even those who are lucky enough to avoid infection, or who don't suffer major distress from it.

People in Seattle are famously polite but aloof; the so-called Seattle chill, or Seattle freeze, is legendary, even if it really does vary from person to person. But everyone I encounter at work I'll ask "how's it going?" by way of greeting, and on Thursday, instead of just saying "fine" or "it's going", people answered. "It's quiet out there." "My commute this morning was amazingly fast." "Business is dying." And so on.

I should note that most of the people I encountered at that point were self-selecting for people who were willing to go downtown during a pandemic, but people were worried about what this would mean for our futures, economically. And they're right to; many food service and hospitality workers live paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks have unexpectedly dried up for them.

The city and state governments have been trying to patch our social safety net to help workers who are affected by this. I'm worried it won't be enough.

***

It's 5:50 am right now and I'm still awake from yesterday. I spent most of Friday wondering if this malaise and mild cough were the virus or just a combination of stress and allergies and bad sleep, but by now I'm fairly certain I'm sick. I'm tired but I'm not tired. I can focus well enough to write. It's hard to say if it will get any worse; right now it feels like a flu that lost interest. It's probably time to start the process of telling people that I'm sick.

It feels weird doing more than just calling work and saying I'm not feeling well. All of this feels weird, which I suppose is why I'm writing it down. I already feel like I should have been doing this a while ago--the conversations and thoughts I was having in the lead-up to this are lost now.

I remember that people were concerned but not alarmed. I remember someone at my fencing class telling me that one of his coworkers was using 'Are you afraid of coronavirus?' as a conversation starter; that coworker, he said, didn't know what to do when he responded with 'No.' I remember feeling like it was strange that the buses weren't emptier.

I plan on writing more of these as time wears, but I don't know when there will be more; I don't expect a lot to happen while I'm home sick, but who knows?

returning, pt. ii

The last thing I expected, when we finally returned home, was for everything to somehow be the same. It shouldn't have been possible. But somehow (I suspect Charlotte was involved, but I'm afraid to ask what she did) the city felt just like it did before everything went wrong. Sure, a lot of the businesses had changed, and of course people had come and gone since we left, but when I walked into the corner bar the bartender just said "You're back? Been a while."

"Yeah," I told her. "I've been away."

"New arm looks good."

"Thanks."

And that was that. She poured me the same drink I always got and we chatted, as if none of the past year had happened. As if things really could just be normal again. And when I walked back home and Nora was curled up reading a book, she smiled the same way she always used to, like she didn't really want to but couldn't quite help it, and just like we had before we sat together in silence.

I know that the city will be different in a thousand little ways that neither of us noticed, just like we are. But sometimes it's nice to return to a superficial similarity, to allow ourselves to believe that nothing has changed.

returning, pt. i

When she returned from her exile, she had changed. It wasn't just her physical appearance, though there was that, too. The dark circles under her eyes, the sickly, wan complexion. She was gaunter than she had been, too; a better friend might have tried to find a moment alone, a moment when she didn't need to project strength and confidence to a world that had stolen everything from her, and asked if she was all right. Asked what had happened to her up at the edge of the world.

(Sometimes I like to imagine the conversation we should have had. Whatever she endured, she should not have had to endure it alone, as she did, and when she returned, all of us simply let her continue to endure. We all thought she could endure, I suppose. But I knew better.)

She had always been . . . composed, I suppose is the word. She bore the weight of the future on her shoulders, after all. She was always reticent, careful with her words, and carried herself with a gravity that could be overwhelming at times. But she also always had such energy, such conviction, that no carefully constructed demeanor could conceal. And when she came back, that energy was different. Darker.

At first I thought that it was just me; previously, when she held court, her presence was inspiring. Now I found myself feeling uneasy. We had built this army . . . not for her, exactly, but we had always known that if she returned, when she returned, it would be hers. Before she had always been so careful to listen, never allowing her thoughts to be known until she had heard every option and formed a final opinion. Now, she seemed to have lost her taste for guiding our discussions with any form of subtlety; she would swiftly silence those who seemed to be straying from the topic, or whose contribution to the conversation was not to her liking. It no longer felt, as it once had, like an open forum where she was the first among equals, the one who would voice the opinion that our discussion had constructed. Now, we were dancing to her tune.

A better friend might have wondered if something was wrong. She was always so careful not to make anyone feel as if she was trying to sway their thoughts or influence their opinion. Instead, I wondered: was it always like this? Perhaps, I thought, she had merely lost subtlety in her exile, or perhaps I had grown wiser, more perceptive. Perhaps she had always been manipulating us and it had only now become apparent.

She returned from exile to find a changed world. A broken world. And perhaps if I had made the effort to take her aside and remind her that I am her friend and I care about her, things could have been different. It doesn't matter now, but sometimes I still miss the way she would smile when we were alone, and I will always wonder if she brought that smile back with her.

time marches on, again

Another month is upon us. Though March is officially the first month of Spring, there's an argument to be made (one my allergies seem to agree with this past few years) that it really starts in February here in Seattle. The rain starts to let up, the sun starts to shine, the sunset starts happening at an hour approaching reasonable, but even on the nicest day you can still feel winter's grip. Some years it's hard to even imagine that spring might be just around the corner.

March, though. Sometimes in March old man winter is still fighting to survive, but you'd have a hard time finding someone who would say that it's winter--not really, anyway. It's a month of chaos and contradictions, where a sky that's cold and dark and grey can be suddenly illuminated by the perfect gold of an unexpected sunset. It's a hard month to really get excited about, but it has its moments. It's the moment when people start coming out of their shells for the winter.

This month's theme is "returning." This time I had a story I wanted to tell and I thought of a theme to fit it, but it works, right? The return of spring, the return of life, the return of . . . I don't know, St. Patrick's Day?

(Can you believe I used the title "time marches on" for my New Year's post instead of saving it for an excellent March pun?)