don't touch your eyes with your hands after cutting green onions. doesn't matter how many times you washed them in between.
you're still going to feel it.
last week Monday, class was cancelled by a post, not even the related blue paper taped to the door of the classroom to inform those of us who missed the post. today, I thought, just for a moment, to make that check on the canvas where the class is set out and set into modules and sections.
this week it will be on zoom, it tells me.
on Tuesday, it was supposed to end here, but when here is suddenly an hour earlier and everything else arranged stays the same it's easier to cancel the plans, even if one of them then implodes.
this is the sixty-sixth March, in a repeating loop of March over and over and over again. to most people the notion of people as little boxes on the screen has ceased to be something novel; for me I still have difficulty taking that final leap of logic whereupon I can acknowledge the humanity represented by that tiny box with a photograph or a generic silhouette.
tomorrow will be March and the day after that will be March and they day after that yet.
I wish my classmates would mute themselves.
I wish they would turn their cameras off.
and in person they are almost hyper-social, commingling with one another amongst a sea of chatter so high keyed it overflows the container that they are in. if they cannot quiet this container then how are they ever supposed to be able to create one where there is safety, for them and for the vulnerable on the other side of the table. remember to wipe down the cutting board or everything you use it for next is just going to smell and taste like green onions.
it.
the little squares on the screen aren't people, for all that they speak with peoples' voices and hear with peoples' ears and desire with peoples' hearts. there is some perverse amount of freedom found in being not—
#AmWriting #Covid19 #March #Funhouse #Golem #Original #Pandemic #Prose #ShortFiction #TheRiver #ThingsThatGoBumpInTheNight #WhateverThisIs