Through This Year

They say the vaccine doesn't work on this new variant, she says, and you wish she didn't. Basically we could be back at square one. 

Another apartment in the building across the street is empty. How many rooms stand abandoned now, how much of New York City is really still breathing? When we are let out of our caverns, what will remain? A few lone yellow cabs crawl down Second Avenue in the icy rain. January was always a month for pause. I miss the river. I miss who I was. I have built a hundred people under my skin since that person, but none of them fit quite right. It's the city that's all wrong. 

I used to think when this was over we would all run right out into the world again, dancing and reclaiming the time we'd lost. I'm starting to think now we will unearth slowly, step blinking into the light, cautious at sudden noises. I think we will test the ground underneath us like ice on a lake in March, won't trust the air we breathe until a new generation is born behind us, oblivious to the plague which passed before their first memories were built. 

We will never be oblivious. We will forever be a hundred people under our skin who endured a plague, a year that wasn't, we will forever have been knocked off our feet by a wind we could never have seen coming. 

I miss the ground under my feet. And I don't know when I could reasonably find it again. 

But maybe it's just January. Maybe it's just that the ice is above me, not below. 

And in January it is thick as all hell.