by Zach Kincaid
You over there, do you see me? I’m just about six feet away, but I could really be on another planet far out in the ether. Winter came in and spiraled everything normal into the hands of escher, into the halls of the asylum.
It’s for the best, they tell us. Haven’t you heard social distance equals love, up is down, and out is in. Handshakes and friendly embraces forgot trolls guarded such bridges. The hole in your head spews poison, and you’re convinced mine does too.
Everyone is now an island, and Donne is undone to the quick. “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” he says, and I guess it’s true if you catch the monster in your mouth, in your lungs. Then the continent of the infected belongs to you, the virus’s new tupperware.
So, keep your distance, and I’ll keep mine. We’ll say it’s for the old, the young, your neighbor, Jesus. Distance is exactly what we need. “Fences make good neighbors,” says Frost’s unnamed neighbor who mends the wall between them.
And we know Frost points beyond the physical, but the advice is worth heeding: “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know, what I was walling in or walling out.” Covid made us do it. I am walling out you and you’re walling out me.
Maybe in the era of barriers - of doors being cloroxed and quarantined shut, of humans touching everything less - each other, food, doors, carts, mail - it’s these walls that might keep us alive. Right?
It’s the rubber gloves I saw the man wear as he went in and out of the bathroom, doing his business all with the gloves, never washing. It’s the masks I saw the couple wearing in the middle of the forest, just in case the squirrels pass it to the trees.
The gloves, masks, distances, and zoom meetings are guards to protect us from one another. The wipes take away any scent of humanity; computers demand less etiquette; the delivery person promises no touching.
It’s Tylenol’s 1982 fiasco taken to every nook and cranny. You will need a safety certificate to enter my island, and I’ll need one to enter yours. That means there’s no true coexistence. We’re not “in this together” as the neighborhood signs suggests.
Oh, I get it. Pretending to care is encouraging at first blush, but I’m afraid the residue that stays through this crisis is more the stuff that the clorox wipes can’t simply bleach away. But now we have a cloak we can wear, disguising our premonitions of the other.
So, keep your distance. I’ll give you an invite, a text, an emoji, a something digital. It doesn’t carry any germ, any human touch, any virus. Or, does it? …Remind me again of exactly what we’re achieving here.