Perhaps the hardest thing to do in these times is to try to find a memory that is even remotely the same. But then again, that may also be a blessing we have yet to comprehend.
It is the afternoon of Good Friday, and it is yet other faded copy of a day here in the New Self-Constructing World. I just watched the Church service for today online. I really believe that, if memory serves me right, I have attended Good Friday services every year for most of my life. To have to sit in the same room and watch the service going on at a Church I used to attend as a kid all the way up to month, was punishing.
Good Friday is not a high Holy Day in the Catholic Church, though it is a day of fasting and not eating meat. But one is not required to go to services. That being said, I do remember these services having a solid attendance each year. And it is not like this thing just breezes by, either. This service, with a church full of people, can easily go on for 90 minutes. (The only service longer, I believe, is the Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday night, as it has an expanded liturgy and much more within it. Easily two hours on that one if you get the right size crowd and choir.) But people, like myself, were drawn to it every year.
My reasons for going were always personal. I had either just lost someone close to me or things were going badly in my life with other relationships and the narrative of The Passion always hit home. And I would always go alone so I could focus on my life and what was going on. I would always cry at the service, sometimes a tear, other times more than expected. But it was a place where I could expose my soul and try to heal up a bit. It felt like leaving a funeral, but with more hope.
But this year, there was none of that. There was no reference point to be found, just the new habit of this new land where one consumes by watching their old habits appear before them on a screen. I remembered sitting in the pews at that church as a kid and thinking that the service lasted for an eternity. What got me through was the fact that on the way home every year, we would get McDonald's Filet-O-Fish on the ride home. It was amazing and a yearly ritual-event that forever
tugs at my heart strings.
The only thing that is the same as those days, or any days up till now, is the song of birds outside the window. I would hear them in Church during the services outside the stained-glass windows. I can hear them from the backyard now, when the insane wind calms down for a bit. I remembered thinking how odd it was for the birds to be singing while the reading of The Passion, a beautiful melody being heard within the most sorrowful text in the Bible. Now, without any context for this, the birds just sounded like birds.
It is slowly dawning on me that the life I have managed to figure out how to exist in as an adult is now gone, most likely never to return in its fullest form. They are now talking about school being out until Autumn and even then with major changes. No school means no contact which means the bars and restaurants will be closed for at least a month or more. Even then, I sincerely doubt that people will go in great numbers as long as the body count stays high in NYC. They just started doing mass graves there as the death toll is rising. That being said, they are saying that the number of people going to the hospital is dropping.
I cannot stress the following enough: WE ARE ALL GUESSING AT EVERYTHING DURING THIS!!!!!!! I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT!!!! NONE! NO ONE DOES! AND DO NOT BELIEVE ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU OTHERWISE AFTER THE FACT! E-V-E-R!
Nothing of any great change will happen until there is a vaccine and cure for this thing...and that vaccine is available and taken by everyone. What is that timeline I have heard? A year and a half at best? Two years? That is one hundred and one more weeks of this or some variation of it.
To be sure, nothing will be untouched by this. When the fear of flesh touching flesh, breath mingling with others' breath, and a cough merely means one has coughed and not a symptom of getting ill with a global pandemic, it is unlikely to be like Camus' ending to The Plague. In the book, there is a hug celebration in town when the gates are open and trains allowed to arrive again. While I am sure that there will be a huge 4th of July fireworks display this year (for the places that can afford it), everything will be at bay, ill at ease with the wondering when the cure will be found, if it will come back, etc. There is talk of possible food shortages and a great economic depression on a global scale that will arrive when this first wave of the pandemic is perceived as over.
And, it is not as though we will be released into a world who is a stranger to what we have been through, waves of humanity not effected by the virus boosting us up with their untouched souls reminding us of where we once were and long to be. No, for we as a globe are all in this together at one time. There will only be people that had it or did not, a unifying binary function amongst all who survive.
That is to say, it took a virus to somehow unite a planet.
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