Don’t get us wrong.
We do pound for what has passed,
But more so all that we passed by—
Unthanking, unknowing,
When what we had was ours.
There was another gap that choked us:
The simple gift of farewell.
Goodbye, by which we say to another—
Thanks for offering your life into mine.
By Goodbye, we truly mean:
Let us be able to say hello again.
This is edgeless doubt:
Every cough seemed catastrophe,
Every proximate person a potential peril.
We mapped each sneeze & sniffle,
Certain the virus we had run away from
Was now running through us.
We slept the days down.
We wept the year away,
Frayed & afraid.
Perhaps that is what it means
To breathe & die in this flesh.
Forgive us,
For we have walked
This before.
History flickered in
& out of our vision,
A movie our eyelids
Staggered through.
We added a thousand false steps
To our walk tracker today
Because every step we’ve taken
Has required more than we had to give.
In such eternal nature,
We spent days as the walking dead,
Dreading disease & disaster.
We cowered, bone-shriveled
As a laurel in drought, our throats
Made of frantic workings,
Feet falling over themselves
Like famished fawns.
We awaited horrors,
Building up leviathans before they arose.
We could not pull our heads
From the raucous deep.
Anxiety is a living body,
Poised beside us like a shadow.
It is the last creature standing,
The only beast who loves us
Enough to stay.
We were already thousands
Of deaths into the year.
Every time we fell heart-first into the news,
Head-first, dread-first,
Our bodies tight & tensed with what now?
Yet who has the courage to inquire what if?
What hope shall we shelter
Within us like a secret,
Second smile,
Private & pure.
Sorry if we’re way less friendly—*
We had COVID tryna end things.
Even now handshakes & hugs are like gifts,
Something we are shocked to grant, be granted.
& so, we forage for anything
That feels like this:
The click in our lung that ties us to strangers,
How when among those we care for most
We shift with instinct,
Like the flash of a school of fish.
Our regard for one another
Not tumored,
Just transformed.
By Hello, we mean:
Let us not say goodbye again.
There is someone we would die for.
Feel that fierce, unshifting truth,
That braced & ready sacrifice.
That’s what love does:
It makes a fact faced beyond fear.
We have lost too much to lose.
We lean against each other again,
The way water bleeds into itself.
This glassed hour, paused,
Bursts like a loaded star,
Belonging always to us.
What more must we believe in.
* In fact, levels of social trust have been in a steep decline in the United States. See David Brooks. Strikingly, a 2021 study suggests that the descendants of the survivors of the 1918 influenza epidemic experienced lowered social trust. See Arnstein Aassve et al.