What was normal is now a room
full of strangers searching the darkness
for someone who kisses
a grandmother who has never gone
this long without embrace. Weren’t we
always afraid that saying you love someone
was a means of killing them slowly?
Oh, the answers we thought we wanted.
We remember the last normal day,
which sounds like a story in the Bible.
Verses containing how we loved
“in the time of Corona”
and in the time of everything else.
Some of us remember better
and some of us see the world
The heart does not always keep
Ideally, at some point in 2021, we will collectively and tacitly agree to take 2020 and throw it in the garbage a necessary step in the process of emerging from the collective mental health crisis that is living during the pandemic. It’s difficult in the moment to remember what “normal” was, because the mind is already working to figure out what a “new” normal will be a vague concept, impossible to imagine and difficult to plan for. At some point in the near future, the general population will have been vaccinated against the virus and life will return to some hobbled version of its former self. Whatever this will look like will be preferable to isolation; all we have to do is wait.