good friday

I’m on day 11 of an infection — presumed to be Covid-19 but noone can say for sure. I seem to be rounding the bend, so to speak. My fever is finally down, I’m on my (hopefully) last day of isolation in the basement and I finally had the energy to write for a few minutes yesterday — a prose poem.

UPDATE: I’ve now had the antibody test and it was positive for Covid-19.

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good friday

Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?

My dad is served all his meals in his room. It is his 17th day without any visitors. My mom sits at her table across town, eating her lunch alone, her thoughts on him, always on him, and she wonders if he will still know who she is when she is finally able to see him again but nobody can tell her when that might be and she thinks of him, she thinks of him, she thinks of him until her thoughts turn in a new direction and migrate north to me, alone in the guest room of my own house where I have finally finished with the fevers but still face the fearful nights filled with the effort to do what is normally effortless. Outside my room I can hear the faint footfalls of my family readying for bed.

Beyond that the world seems silent and I wonder if maybe everyone else feels what I do, if everyone else feels the same squeezing in their chest; the unbearable weight on their breast bone as they lay upon their bed, afraid that the pressure will never abate but push and push and push until their very body is cleaved in two, torn like the temple veil, like my parents, like all of us now alone together, like the atom, exploding, flying, obliterating everything we thought we knew about the world.