Elise and I went together but were separated from one another in the queue. She was called inside to register at one of the laptop computers while I continued to wait in the long, dark hall, hot save for the buzzing of a standing fan at the end of the corridor. I wouldn't see her again until we were done.
I was called inside a few minutes later, but Elise had already left the room and was in the waiting area. I filled out a from, sat at a laptop while an attendant entered my name and date of birth, among other vital information. A few moments after that, I entered the room where there were two chairs standing at opposite ends, a nurse with a needle hovering over each one.
I picked the one closest to the entrance, not so arbitrarily; I happened to know the nurse, the mom of one lady of Clementine's classmates. "Are you ready?" She asked.
A ninja movie played on the TV overhead, soundless, yet fists of fury did little to calm me.
I nodded my head.
And she stuck the needle in my arm.
"Is it out?"
"It’s out."
For some reason, I pictured blood squirting out of my arm. "Is the band-aid on?"
"It's on."
"Now, you know where Clem gets it," I quipped, referring to the two instances she passed out at the doctor's office after getting a vaccination.
"You can stay as long as you like."
As it turned out, I didn't need to stay as long as I thought I might. Needles aren't my favorite to begin with, and I passed on the phobia to all three children; some are growing out of it faster than others. Not to mention anticipation has been building toward this moment for over a year. In the end, it was somewhat anticlimactic.
I rejoined Elise on the other side of the needle. I pulled a chair up next to her in the hall outside the doctor's office. We sipped from juice boxes, basking in temporary relief, an atemporal moment, as though every second of the last year had led up to this moment, this juice box. I put my hand on Elise's leg, disrupting her reverie.
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Yesterday marked a new peak for the number of cases in Sri Lanka. Until today. And likely tomorrow will bring a new peak.
In the mornings, a bird Elise calls the 'snorlax' (because when it chirps it sounds like snoring) sings from a palm tree outside the window to our bedroom. There are squirrels that live there, too, a arboreal rodent that looks more like a nimble chipmunk. They chirp, too, and if you get one started, the maddening sound can go on for what seems like hours, like a neighbors car alarm going off in the night. These quotidian auditory cues remind life goes on, completely unaware a pandemic moves across the island, and when does a pandemic become a plague?
The numbers -- the death -- are nothing like India, just to the north, 30 miles of seawater in the Palk Strait separating the island nation from the subcontinent. The news from there is horrifying, apocalyptic. We are left wondering how funeral pyres do not spread the virus, ashes of disease falling on Delhi slums like snow. The fact the pandemic had relatively spared India had always seemed somewhat miraculous, hard to believe, and ultimately, now we see, fleeting. We think frequently of friends and colleagues there, Mrs. Rita, Mr. Sundar, and, of course, Elise's only cousin and his family in Mumbai.
The answer is never. A pandemic never becomes a plague, because a plague is not an epidemiologic term but one that refers specifically to a bacterial disease, such as bubonic plague, and not a viral disease. I guess that's good news, then. As bad as the pandemic may get, it will never become a plague.
Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, schools have closed (again), and the temporary relief felt after receiving first doses of the vaccine is gone.
It wasn't until late 1918, almost a year after most of the world had been dealing with the devastating effects of the Spanish Flu, that Sri Lanka suffered a deadly second wave, much as it is now. 20,000 Sri Lankans died that winter from the flu, demonstrating the island's vulnerability.
Peter had been back to school five weeks and Sam and Clementine three before this most recent surge in cases forced schools to close again. We had just returned from spring break. All three kids were happy to be back, elated, giggly a little, even. They were picking after-school activities. Peter was reading more and had signed up for book club. Clementine was (appropriately enough) joining the drama club. Sam had a posse he hung with at lunch and in between classes; after bouncing between a couple of different groups that didn't quite feel right, he found a fit. He was grooving.
The closure of schools was extended to May 10. I don't know if I expect them to go back this year. Sam seems to feel the disappointment most acutely. When the government closed schools again, he was disgruntled, aggrieved. He bounced back and forth between Peter and Clementine like a pinball stuck in a broken machine, pinging between them, aggravating one, then the other. He was boastful and braggadocios in ways unlike him. Then, he hit Clementine over the head with a metal water bottle after swim practice Friday night.
“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
We initiated a new practice this morning, 20 minutes of meditation. We had already cleared everything out of the dining room to make room for Elise's easel, a yoga mat, and a place to put our bicycles that wasn't directly in the path of the front door. It was a fair trade. This morning we placed pillows on the floor in the newly-emptied space. Myself, Elise, and the three kids sat cross-legged on the pillows in front of Elise's laptop while it played the first episode of a mindfulness routine that had us focusing on heavy sitting bones and thighs, an elongated spine, and a sensation in our chests' not unlike the unfurling of rising steam, all with closed eyes.
An April 19 New York Times article by Adam Grant, "
There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing" attempts to describe the feeling many of us have been stuck with for the past year, "Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021." Austin Kleon's rebuttal, "
I’m not languishing, I’m dormant" argues, "I’m not languishing, I’m dormant. Like a plant. Or a volcano. I am waiting to be activated."
There's something to take away from both articles, and I do feel guilty thinking more about the societal effects of the pandemic on our collective psychologies than the thousands still dying daily. We've survived the pandemic as well as we have mostly due to extreme privilege, hard work and resilience, and a lot of luck.
But it's probably Sigal Samuel's April 28 article "
Of course you’re anxious about returning to normal life" that I may appreciate more, "the worry about returning to a global normal we’d rather not come back to. The pandemic broke open public discourse around issues that were either typically sidestepped — mental health struggles, for instance — or accepted with little resistance, like the rigidity of the modern workday. Will returning to normal life mean sweeping these hard conversations back under the rug?"
I feel guilty, too, for wanting a 'new normal', something transformational, when so many's prosperity and livelihoods, their ability to support their families relies on a return to normal, going back to the pre-pandemic normal, to exactly the way things were.
But it doesn't matter what normal we have if your father dies for lack of an oxygen cylinder.
“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
