Queue

Forty-five minutes the line wraps around the block, New Yorkers are weary with custom, it never takes long. Weave through the grocery store, this only connection to the world as you knew it before, in a daze. The list is long, as the absence has been: they are still out of flour but you find vitamins, and pears, how you've longed. The woman on the screen speaks of dreaming a life into existence. Three hundred virtual faces stare back at her, and you wonder what sort of life they are dreaming of. You wonder the same of yourself. The lilacs in the community garden bloom, and every time I come back from the river, I stop, pull down the mask from my mask, and smell them, take deep, hungry gulps of air. I think it's a metaphor, but it doesn't have to be.

The simple pleasures were always pleasures. We got confused in the noise. The lesson is here, when we are ready.