How the world became place where we remembered breath
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In a place where the wild met the city, where capital met life and life meets death. It was a market, so far away that no one I have ever known has been there, but it was there. Something happened there, a colliding of species, two great ecosystems — one of them human — embracing, cohabiting, co-consuming, or just breathing. Something slipped slyly by and into history.
Something on the edge of life that could dive to the center of it, something not alive but with agency, with the lust for replication that blossoms in every bush on this small planet. Something perhaps more curious than sinister, wanting to see the world. Something escaped its story and jumped into ours.
The Something was so tiny it was unstoppable, it slipped beneath, through, around, over and into all of our defenses. Our passport controls, our border checks, our bodies. She waltzed right by, shaking hands with Presidents and politicians, rubbing noses with the elite, luxuriating on the sundecks of oil-driven cruiseships.
But let us not think of Coronavirus as invisible, do not fall for her folly, for it is not alive. Its power is simple: it can change periods into commas. It can un-end sentences. What was sealed and solved, what was packaged and piled, what had already been swept away is now again unfinished; read to be rewritten.
Economies
Borders
Health
Energy
Everything,
everything now has been reopened.
Rather than being anything her own; no she is far to small and clever for that. She is instead a slight red tint, a change of font, a new sub-title to the world as it was the day before she arrived.
Her fingerprints stain, leaving long clues stretched behind her. A coughing wake barely able to breathe. From these clues we start to see clusters; gatherings, groupings, accumulations. They stain darker trailways, like spilled ink on a scratched table; they gather in the cuts that were already there; already laid across the landscape like barbed wire.
Deep ones, unhealed but closed — slavery, genocides. And newer scratches — cuts in social fabric, cuts to hospitals, cuts to life. Pairing down to a minimum. Cuts like borders where fences keep foxes from their rivers. Airplane trails that cut like scars across the sky.
The ink bleeds out, revealing the existing scratches in a surface that is constantly cleaned. A new filter, a new font. The cuts overflow and move onto the streets. They chain trains at Waterloo, then again in Berlin. They stay out too late in bars and then catch the red-eye to LA for some hotshot reception.
Cough, cough. Excuse me.
Where she travels she leaves stories in her wake. People dress in black and masks; everyone wears gloves.
Don’t touch anything; it is hers now.
The nurse arrives late, again. Two people, one bed, one machine.
“One minute please”. Find a door, any door, open it, close it. Hide for a second. Its such a bitch to cry but not be able to touch your face. Ok.
“Mrs. McConnoly.”, right this way please.
“Mrs. Wolloster”, please have a seat.
She can turn commas into periods, too. As if someone had flattened all the piano keys, or sharpened all the high notes.
Perhaps this is what it feels like when songbirds raise their songs a register, just to get above the traffic machines. An invisible jump, largely unperceived. But a great change if the story is told from another angle.
So lets tell it from another angle:
Four days ago the traffic machines stopped trafficking, and the bold young songbirds felt their too-high song exposed. So they dropped down a register, dropped back, dropped in. Sang louder because they felt like they would be heard. This too, she leaves in her wake.
So where are we?
We are somewhere just ahead of her, or just behind; her ink tendrils wrapping and writing around us like a memory, keeping us in our houses, keeping us home. Her grip usually loosens in a few days, (if she has not claimed you as her own) and when her grip loosens — your punctuation has changed. You can hear the songbird above the silence, and the falling of enough tears to fill an ocean.
We become uncomfortable in our isolation now. Too many empty chairs coming to too many half empty tables. Slowly, its as if the walls of our chamber were summoning us out of our quarantines and into history. Our fingers idle on the keys. We sit with this feeling, soak it in. Seep it up and spread it.
There is no turning back besides turning our back.
There’s no going back. But once we have turned we see things that were already there, hiding. Hiding, before the inkspill scratches showed their fine intersecting lines like a poisonous spider weaves a web. But it is the web, not the poison, that changes the punctuation of the breathing sky.
Two ecosystems, brushing against each other. Exchanging vows.
we are about to become alive.
