Member-only story
This Is Us
Everything I’ll Do When This Is Over
Because making plans is how I cope
I was going to tell you about all the things I miss. What we willfully take for granted until it’s seized from us. Repossessed from us deadbeats and payment dodgers. I miss the intimacy between strangers — the small spaces our bodies occupy in the aisles of grocery stores and streets. The idea that I can be around people without knowing them. Asking if they can grab that can or box because I’m impossibly short and they’re probably tall. The gentility of the reach and the nod when it’s placed in my hand.
Now, everyone steps back. Faces obscured by scarves and masks and flimsy fabric. They make mental calculations of the space between us. Is it enough? Does she have it? Will she make me sick? Now, if I want a box of cereal, I have to roll up to the supermarket in heels. Stand on tiptoe.
Everyone’s become a mathematician.
I read an essay by Samantha Irby about the mixtapes of her youth. And for a few brief, heartbreaking moments, I’m no longer here: isolated in a high-desert house where the windows shake, lizards curl in the cool of cinderblocks, and our clothes are painted terra-cotta from the cool sand. I’m drinking Snapple and Rolling Rock in a dorm room in the Bronx. It’s 1994, and I’m sporting Docs, a…
