I Can't Breathe In The Milk Isle

His shirt is sitting on a pile of boxes, which is on top of another pile of blankets. It has been with me for months, since he and I went to a red light party in Brooklyn, back when that was a thing you could do, before over 1,500 people were dead in our state alone, back before this month, which honestly feels like a year. He tells me he is in the hospital; he is the second person I know to have it, and he could die. I picture his body, the times when we have gone out to eat, and he had eaten piles of pancakes, a whole Chili’s sampler by himself. I’m not skinny, but he is different. It never bothered me, until this moment, where my too vivid writers mind can picture him, his short black hair, his face underneath an oxygen mask, the blue too thin blanket over his too big body. And it makes me sick to my core.

My mom groans and rolls her eyes at the TV. My grandmother called last night, sobbing. “Everyone’s dying!” she cries. She’s terrified, and at her age, with her cancer, she could die just from being that scared. But she is in Florida, and we are here, and there is nothing we can do to assuage her fears, especially as we are in the epicenter. I saw a guy with yellow dish gloves going into Wegman’s yesterday, the panic is everywhere. I’m losing my mind.

I used to write creatively almost every day, I have pages on pages of stories, thousands of views on my stories on writing sites. But when I saw this assignment, my heart dropped. Because honestly, I’m at a loss. Graduation, which I have worked so hard for, a party in the Summer I am desperate for, to say Hell Yeah, graduate. It’s not going to happen. I’m the first Nye to graduate college and yet I’m here, how could that be? What’s the point in creating anything when all I have to say is just as depressing as what everyone else has to say?

I went with my mom to three different stores today, to buy one case of beer for my dad. The line out of Wegman’s was around the building, the liquor store was closed for “in store shopping” despite supposedly being an essential business, Shoprite seemed fine, until we got to the check out line. Which now, has been made so that it encompasses one single whole isle. My mother nearly dropped the beer when she sees the line going all the way back to the milk. I’d laugh at her, but my mask I’m now forced to wear makes my asthma worse, so I am panting, and it feels like I can’t get any air in besides the hotness in front of my face. But, do I dare pull it up? Even just a little? Do I dare to really breathe? The woman ahead of us in line, with short brown hair and blue mask, just wants to buy some hot dogs. Does she deserve to get sick because I can’t breathe?

So, I stand in the supermarket, trying to act like I’m okay, like this is normal, because what else am I going to do?

As more time has passed, I've thought about that question a lot. And many others- do I even go to the milk isle anymore? What to say, how to say it, do I agree with the government? or with the charts that show a constant downturn and yet were still not open? Is Murphy really planning on making this the "new normal" for possibly a year and a half? (when the vaccine comes out) and if he does, what's to make people even take the vaccine? Over 50,000 people die a year from the flu, and yet people still don't get vaccinated. What then? What now?

I sit pretty much helpless to face these questions. There are no answers. Or, there are five conflicting answers, none of which seem to make sense. Thing after thing adds up, and then falls right back down. I don't have the answers, and I don't know that I ever will. But I anxiously await the documentaries that will come out in ten years, or five years. The ones that will try to make sense of this time in an hour and a half. I'll have no words as I watch them and remember what it was like to not breath in the milk isle.