Paradox

The summer was bullish. We offered our bar stools to couples in tight dresses, bodies pushing against each other underneath the purple flowers draped from the ceiling, pulsing pink, purple, red against the flashing lights. People were dancing, drinks sloshing over onto shining floors. Laughter punctuated the buzz of chatter. It smelled alive.

We ran down the streets in heels and dresses, because nothing else mattered: the tingle of breeze on mosquito-bitten arms, the belly laughs, the talking about things we would forget. We wore masks around our wrists like bracelets.

We wrapped our arms around each other, smelling the laundry detergent and perfume and soap, the smell of skin and human beings. We clinked glasses, laughed, danced, had sex, shared secrets with strangers: a collective effervescence in a sea of people where we belted lyrics and moved as one.

Signs, plastered on the walls, gave the vaccinated permission to unmask. We almost trusted each other, feeling the sighs, the respiratory wisps of chatter on our shoulders.

It almost felt normal, this bullishness. This fleeting jolt of normality sent its shock waves. They buoyed us up, and we rode them from sea to shining sea. Rainbow flags. BLM fists. Shirts that said “resist,” “justice,” “love.” The parades. Trains barreled in, spilling people who ran to join us in the liberation, the libation, the rain.

We whirled past the talk of delta, into the arena where we dared each other to be bolder. Tabletops. Warm vodka. Chatter. We crossed loosened thresholds, stretching into the unknown. We uncorked what we held within.

The fall came, and it held us in a tighter grip. Delta came. The masks returned, containing breaths and laughter; protection, in renewed vogue. We quarantined, stayed indoors, swabbed our noses. We crossed our fingers tightly, hoping the second stripe wouldn’t appear. False positives reigned, a dopamine rush of hope. Delta raged, cutting past state borders and sailing across oceans, spiking bell curves and sparking the debates and dividing us along lines of truth.

The scientists raced to analyze the protein structures in a valiant attempt to outpace the spread, telling us Omicron has targeted a few countries, when we all know it’s ubiquitous. Headlines became code.

Two weeks’ notice turned into the new currency, and the streets were flecked with wanderers and resignation announcements. Cages shuttered the stores that continued going out of business. The Great Resignation promised more than it could sustain.

A Boston Tea Party of vaccines tossed overboard, a celebration of "freedom" that ended in hospitalization and trapped lungs. A fresh wave of anger ran awash on them. Our questions came with relentless force, and they still dodged. They still touted the fossil fuels and the big businesses, the one percent and their god, Capitalism. They bowed down, watching the ice sheets melt before their eyes, because this would not be their world anymore. The looming reality of a red-flipped country flashed, a neon light upon our consciousness.

All of this, contained within our borders. People lined the edges of this country, scaling the wall, thrashing through rivers; an Afghan girl crouched in the cellar, her family burning her wrists for refusing to marry a Talib; a virulent haze of Covid infiltrated India another time, vaccines running dry. We tried to stand in solidarity, tears running down cheeks as we glimpsed. The best of us did not avert our eyes.

There were a few good things, and they were hidden, subtle. You had to look for them. In the subway, a man harmonized with the sound of wheels on track. Motorcycles streamed down the avenue; minutes later, a faint humming in the innermost part of the seashell of my ear. A Doppler effect where tones and pitches dip and curve, unchangeable yet changing all the same.

The laughter of a contact tracer checking in for the second time, relaying the message that it was a false positive after all. An erased stripe on the test, a sigh of relief. A fact falsified, restoring both confidence and fear.

The occasional good news shone through the bad, and yet it was that good news that unhinged us in its false promises: the mingling of truth and untruth, indistinguishable in the change.

We’re left simultaneously ignorant and armed with everything we have.