By the time QC and I started chatting again, my Big
East Coast City had been on lockdown for a month. I’d lost my morning job and
(I hope temporarily) lost 2/3 of my client-hours from my own business. I was worried
that all the work I’d put in building a life for myself would disappear
forever, and like everybody else, I was worried that somebody I loved might
die. I had Sweetie to hug, high five, and talk to, but having an ex-wife as a
quarantine buddy has its own fears and strains.
My mom, a state away, wasn’t social distancing and my
Trumpish Favorite Aunt had no problem trolling me about it. “Who dies, dies.”
said Favorite Aunt in a text, presumably meaning herself, her grandkids, my
mom, whoever. Meanwhile, mom shifted into full-tilt gaslighting mode, suggesting
that I might be causing coronavirus or at least making it worse with my fear.
I wanted to be Helpful Science Person and try to stem
the tide of disinformation, but a stop by a semi-estranged cousin’s facebook
page convinced me that reaching out to most of my family was futile. I felt
hurt and panicked and irresponsible to know that there are some places truth
and science just can’t reach.
But, for all of those sad scared feelings, I knew I
was safe. The flowering trees in the neighborhood were just going completely
bonkers, I had books and funny podcasts and watercolors. In my neighborhood,
people had been putting up rainbows everywhere for kids to find on their walks.
One Sunday afternoon, I’d just finished doing some
melancholy/cheering work errands while driving around singing George Michael’s Faith
at the top of my lungs, and I decided to take a nice fast walk. When guess
what!! The friend who was soon to be QC texted and said he wanted to be writing
more. I’d wanted to be in touch with him better for a good long while, and I
wanted to keep writing too, so I suggested writing something together. By the
time I got home from my walk, I had a poem!
Writing to/for/with him was easy and fun at first! It
gave me such a joyful feeling of completeness, an oasis of oh! This makes
sense! In a life that felt like helplessness and chaos a lot of the time, what
a pleasure to just let something new sprout and exist! The first one I wrote wasn’t
even really a poem so much as it was just listing off a series of things that made
me feel grumpy, but he took it and ran with it, someplace good.
There was no reason this had to be about falling for
him. Maybe if I hadn’t included a link to a (completely uncute, unflirty) song
in one of the poem emails, (It was William Shatner covering “Common People,”
seriously the un-woo-ing-est song) and he hadn’t mentioned that he was
listening to an album with the most wildly sentimental first song (see above),
then maybe I’d still be all cool and friendly and writing all the poems.
(But probably not.) (And not that I’ve ever been cool
in any way.)
Nevertheless, songs were exchanged, and the time
difference between us meant that he might have been offhandedly sending links
between work tasks or palling around with other folks while I was in bed all
swoony and cozy and susceptible. Not everything was sincere and moony, but he’s
much more folky/songwritery than I am. It was easy, with his song choices, to
slip into mostly-chaste twenty-years-ago-love
without (all-the-way) meaning to, but also not really minding.
It was only a few nights, really, of waiting for the
buzz of my phone, listening a couple times, knowing exactly what to send next,
then dozing with a warm, briefly untroubled heart. I forgot, I guess, that that
kind of thing is like a nine-millionth-date to my emo self. I got my heart into
a little bit of a tangle.
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