If It Isn’t Tuesday Anymore, Does It Matter?
Is it even Tuesday anymore? Do we still keep the same calendars that we did before the world as we knew it ended in 2020? Can we really call it an ending if no one can even pinpoint when it actually began? What if we have been living with this for longer than any of us have realized? What if the pandemic is actually more of a slow burn rather than the sudden explosion it has been portrayed as?
Do you remember what you were doing on the day everything shut down? Who were you before you were afraid to walk outside and talk to your neighbors while you got your mail? Did you smile more? Can anyone remember what it’s like to bump into someone on the street and not instantly regret going outside that day?
Is anyone else having a difficult time remembering?
How did we get here? Does the Halsted bus still run along the same route that it used to? If I run down the stairs at the red line to try to catch the L, will it still be singing “doors closing” a half-second before I could have gotten on? Are there still people riding the trains, or are we all just ghosts now?
If there are ghosts on the train, does that make it more or less scary than the before times? If a ghost is reading a newspaper while they wait for their stop, does the paper still make the same, crisp page-turning sound as they flip through the day’s destruction that it used to before all of this?
Have you also begun to use placeholders instead of the word pandemic? Do you trail off and gesture vaguely into the air whenever you are talking about the current state of our world? Does “all of this” mean the pandemic, or is it really all of this? Is it everything we have all tried to bury, furiously bursting out of the grave, one skeletal finger at a time?
If I look in the mirror and say pandemic five times, will it have the same effect as saying “Candyman?” Is there something we said that brought all of this on? Did a misspoken Bible passage initiate the end of times, or is it simply just the end?
Is it possible to be more afraid of the world than I am right now? How many times do I have to pray on my rosary to make all of this go away? Is this the penance we the people deserve for the gruesome history of war and devastation we have inflicted upon this planet? Is the Earth finally seeking its revenge?
Are all of these hurricanes just centuries of tears finally escaping a planet that is so fucking tired of all of this bullshit? Are the skyrocketing temperatures and blazing wildfires just God’s way of getting us used to hell? Or are we already there? If you dip your toes into the flames first, does that make it easier once they swallow you whole? Is that the answer to how anything could have ever gotten this bad?
Was there another world before this one, where the human race wreaked such havoc that purgatory wasn’t even a consideration, we were all just damned straight into hell? Can you imagine a world worse than the one we have all created? Does it scare you to think that there were others before us, and maybe we are just paying the price for the wrongs they committed?
Is it fair for the whole to be punished if there is just one bad seed? Should we focus on the problem, or zoom out and only see things for what they are on the surface? If we all tell ourselves that we’re okay, will we eventually start to believe it? If everything we read tells us that we are returning to normal, does that mean that we are? How long do you have to lie to yourself until the lie becomes a permanent part of your reality? Is all of this just an exercise in how to manufacture a new reality?
If I take one lie every day with my cup of black coffee, will that make it go down more easily? Will I trust it more if I wrap the lie into something familiar before I try to digest it as the truth? How many times have you told yourself that you are fine when you really feel like you are drowning? If I hold onto these lies will they save me? Or maybe we shouldn’t focus so much on being saved and instead, we should all just let the dissonance swallow us whole?
Has it really been almost two years since all of this started? Or did the hourglass already run out before we even remembered to look up to acknowledge it?
If it isn’t Tuesday anymore, does it matter?
