Sine

My room begins to look a mess, half-packed suitcases and street-scavenged cardboard boxes jumbled about the toppled piles of paper. Did I have this many books always? He writes to say he moved your car, everyone does as much as they can. You are grateful. From the back of my closet I pull winter coats and vintage dresses, reminders that I was not always this husk of a pandemic being, was not always a toad. But now I eat flies and do not fit into these colorful fancies, these visions of what a New Yorker might be. I don't remember how to wear things that make me happy. Do not remember how to feel my body in the world. 

I pack them and close the suitcase. This is not the time to think of it. 

For so long, I imagined us coming out of this pandemic in an explosion, a celebration in the streets when the war was over. But now I see life will return in fits and starts, in scurries across open plazas, I see now that there are parts of our old selves that will never come back. 

This post doesn't have an ending. Nothing is neatly tied together yet.