How are you guys doing? Elisabeth texts. Best of times/ worst of times, I write back. Sometimes, truly, life feels like it’s being lived in a saccharine snow globe. On a drizzly night, we dance in the living room. Fire blazing, Spotify crooning a private Bill Withers concert (segueing into 90s R&B, then Kendrick Lamar. Somehow we always end up at Kendrick Lamar).

One afternoon the weather is glorious. Clear skies, verging on double digits, and I bring my laptop and a glass of wine to the front step. Fiddling with a scene, I overhear a six year-old admonish a friend: “We have to stay in our bubbles.” A neighbour comes by - keeping her distance - and tells me that they’ve been sleeping in every morning (why not?) and her husband, a chef, has been making elaborate meals, and they miss their family and their friends, and sometimes, okay, yes, the children are a lot, but it’s kind of nice too. I know, I tell her. It feels like sacrilege to say but yes. Sometimes it is kind of nice too.

Not zombies

On a walk, I pause to watch a mother in a garden, blowing bubbles for her daughter. A stranger sits at his window and we wave to each other. A friend has hurt her ankle and I drop off an ice pack. She has a cooler on the doorstep, a receptacle for contact-less deliveries. The sign on top - “piss off covid-19” - gives me a chuckle. I ring the doorbell, wave from the sidewalk. All over town, windows are gussied up. Rainbows and stuffies and jolly homemade posters that say “Thank you!” and “At least it’s not Zombies.” Indeed, Tom says, when I tell him about the sign. At least it’s not bombs dropping on our heads.

And still.

But also.

I chew the inside of my cheeks raw. And bolt awake at 3am, roused from innocuous dreams and terrible nightmares, all of which are set in the pre-Pandemic world. I refuse to think about the worst case scenarios but their prospects loom all the same. A freelance job gets cancelled. I worry about an upcoming project, a big pay cheque that was practically guaranteed, psych myself up for its inevitable cancellation. Friends text to say they’ve been laid off, are worried about their jobs, their books, and indie book shops, the future of our industry, are our careers utterly and irreparably fucked? Everything is contracting. Our lives. The economy. Any sense of time beyond today.

My sister calls on FaceTime so my niece won’t forget what I look like. Rachel is one and thinks I live in the phone and this would be funny if it wasn’t heart breaking. I’m so envious of anyone who can visit their families, who can trade stories from across the expanse of a driveway or wave through windows.

Shag off Covid

But we have phone calls and text. Zoom movie nights and Skype coffee dates and virtual role playing games, which is, yes, a thing I did for the first time last Saturday (it was nerdy and fun). Technology keeps us tethered. On Wednesday nights I video chat with my oldest group of girlfriends. Across four cities and three time zones, we catch up on our weeks, share news from our bubbles. Tash crouches in the basement, hiding from her kids. We laugh at the absurdity of our lives. In the pre-Pandemic world, we could barely synch our schedules for a coherent group text but now this standing date is the one constant in my calendar. I miss everyone so much and if I think about it for too long the sadness is overwhelming.

One afternoon, the doorbell rings. A friend waves from the sidewalk. She’s left two cupcakes on the stoop. They are homemade, with root beer in the batter and the perfect icing to cake ratio and for a while I forget to be sad and anxious and, licking icing off my fingers, think fondly of Meghan, going on to the next delivery, pausing to appreciate the teddy bears in someone’s window. Oh, this terrible, beautiful time.