reality blurs

from my journal 4/20

I finished the Book of Delights by Ross Gay, and it was an uncanny experience partially because so much of the book is about touching people – how nice it is when people come together, when they touch, when they work on a task or in a community garden with each other. There is an entire chapter on how much Gay likes it when people touch his shoulder, when people he doesn't know dap him, about being in public, in public space.

It's been 39 days of quarantine (but who's counting,) and even watching television or movies feels weird to me – people eating together, taking the train, walking down a crowded street... Was there ever such a time? Will that time ever come again?

I had a nightmare last night that I was at a beer festival – odd because I don't even like beer and would never attend a beer festival. It was summer, and everyone had closed me in against a table. I was wearing a tank top, and I looked at my brown shoulders in the summer sun. I felt hot, uncomfortable, and confused. Why wasn't anyone else scared? I reached for my neck and felt I had a bandana I could cover my mouth with, and I did, but everyone around me was dancing in a perverse simulacrum of "happy spring break."
"Stop!" I started to scream. "Let me out of here!" I told them. But no one could hear me and no one cared. I woke up in a sweat.

People keep saying that things will be different once all this is over, that we won't ever go back to normal, and I hope in some ways we don't. I could live without wasteful beer festivals and streets flooded with trash. I would be sad, though, if I could no longer walk down a crowded street without fear, if I could never hug a stranger or eat off a friend's plate or buy something from a thrift store. I feel unsettled about this, more unsettled than I have in months. It makes reality blur and slip, and the seeming strangeness of things I used to take for granted is troubling.