Postcard From Quarantine

I have been talking to Lenny since I was 14. Technically, she  started it, her silent voice at 4 a.m. Sometimes I will ask her for things. She always answers me  and sometimes she grants what I ask for. Lately, we have been talking about isolation. She says, “You know, Jesus laid in the tomb, alone, for three days.” But she already knows that I know that. I’m tired of the isolation but she says, “Hang in there; we have a plan.”

It’s not getting back to normal, she says, even though that’s what everyone keeps saying they want. That’s not in the plan and, honestly, I’m okay with that. The thing that we know about normal, before 55,000 people died in my state, is that normal wasn’t great. It was evil. Evil in ways you could not see. But we saw the evil in the world and we knew the world needed a change. And then—like a miracle sprung from heaven—everything changed. Locked down and changed.

It will never be normal again. There will always be a scar to remind us of this moment.  A beautiful scar, like the one that traced the side of Ajha’s face, her skin darker than mine, but you could still see the thin scar spread from just outside the corner of her left eye to the left corner of her mouth, a half crescent reminder of her childhood. The scar made her light brown eyes incredibly sad, even when she was laughing with us. Sometimes when she stood before me, her head coming up to my chin, you couldn’t see it. Like her face forgot to remind us. Then she would look up at me and I would fall in love with her again. Fall in love again even as her weight dropped, the scar became more prominent and her voice softened to a bare whisper.

 The world before was filled with her. How can it go back to normal now? The world before was pregnant with her death, the tension of her always almost leaving us.

 We were told to lock down. To educate at home. To distance. To cover our faces. We did as we were told. And then, in the middle of our precautions, our closest friend died and we became free: free to love her memory, to visit her memorial, to freeze the moment: her smile, the laugh she laughed only with us.  We were blessed, husband, daughter, son, for knowing her.

They want us to go back to normal, to where we suffered, where we hurt—her physically, us in every other way—every day.

When the diners and the bars and the movies and libraries open back up, my wife won’t be there. Lenny knows she won’t be there.

Once when we were laying in bed, she told me that she had taken years of abuse as a girl in her first marriage, not knowing any better, until it seemed normal. We were watching this movie.  I was happy to have her head on my bare chest, stroking her dark hair. Absently I said, half watching TV, half listening to her, “Too bad you didn’t know me then.”

My chest became wet with tears from her left eye. I was stupid. Such a stupid thing to say.  Stupid was my normal.

People are wearing masks in public now, some black, some colorful, some flat, some pointed, and you can’t tell if they are smiling at you or secretly thinking of ways to kill you.  The governor says we can go back to work Monday. The President said we need to get the economy re-vitalized again. Our Senator tweeted out “back to normal!”

But, Lenny, you know I don’t want to go back to normal. I can’t go through losing Ajha again.

 I’d rather die.