A Pandemic Missive

The Curated coat (similar)
Everlane sweater
Sezane jeans
Rouje boots (similar)
JW Pei handbag (similar)
Burberry scarf
Anthropologie beret (similar)
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (similar)
Location: The Ambassador Apartments – Winnipeg, Manitoba

Dear friends,

It’s been a long time since I’ve written you a letter. More than two years, in fact. I wrote letters on our last trip to Paris in February 2019, a holiday that simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago and as though it happened yesterday. (The pandemic quickly proved that linear time truly is a human construct, easily manipulated and just as easy to lose track of entirely.) Missives aren’t really my style. The Notes app on my phone is full of hastily typed, quickly forgotten poems. I leave my vulnerability where it lays and move on. 

…but here we are. I’m writing from the couch at my parents’ house. It’s the afternoon of Easter Sunday, but there is no big dinner this year. We spent the afternoon in the yard with some members of the extended family who we haven’t seen for over a year – all sitting six feet apart of course, no hugs or handshakes exchanged despite the passage of time. It’s a pandemic, after all. I admit that I bristled when I heard my uncle sniffle.

There was no real danger, of course. And because we are cautious people, he’s gone home, with the rest of his family. They will eat on their own, while we stay with Mom and Dad, the only people in our social bubble. Dinner will be whatever they were planning to eat before we arrived. There doesn’t seem to be much sense in planning ahead these days, when it’s impossible to know whether celebrations will be permitted from one day to the next.

This isn’t the first missive I’ve penned in this spot. I’ve written letters on my parents’ couch many times over the years. But it seems that even when I had little to report to faraway friends, I had more to say for myself than I do now. Mom is telling me how she and Dad still plan to drive to see friends in Alabama someday, eventually. Memphis, Tennessee is right on the way, apparently, and Mom wants to go to Graceland. I have plans like this, too; we want to buy an apartment in Athens, you know, someday, when we actually go to see Athenian apartments in person.

…whenever that might be. I was doing some math in my head in the shower this morning and I calculated that it seems like, realistically, we can hope for 2024.

This is what the pandemic has wrought. Rather than singing in the shower, I tally days and weeks, months and years, calculating the probability of when we can possibly move on.

In the meantime, we wait. We contemplate the prospect of the future from a position of stasis, where neither past nor future truly exists, just the present, repeated ad nauseam. And the truth is, I am sick – sick of writing the same thing over and over again, tired of the idea that any letter I send will contain no new information or original thoughts. I buy clothes to wear nowhere, photograph myself in places I go just for the sake of those photographs. What strikes me most is that it is all meaningless without people. The people we knew and loved, but also the people we met along the way, sometimes just for a moment or a day.

So I’ve written this letter, I suppose, to tell you all that I appreciate you. That I appreciate the fact that you’re still here, even when your own lives may feel as meaningless and repetitious as mine does… that you keep coming back, even if it’s just another activity that you’re repeating because the pandemic means you have nothing else to do. Even when everything else seems futile and senseless, your presence does mean something, at least to me. Thank you for being here.

Shop the Post