Quarant-Zine Spring 2021
an open letter (to you, specifically) Written by Elaina
I think that it would have been easier if the end of the world as we knew it had been violent. A massive meteor, imperialistic aliens, famished zombies. Maybe, even, if we had been lucky, Yellowstone would have exploded, and we could have had some beautiful sunset days before the ash swallowed us whole. Anything but this slow, never-ending death. It’s like that scene in the Nutcracker, when the Rat King is stabbed and spends two minutes waltzing across the stage, staggering, flopping, reaching for his henchmice with trembling fingers. God. Just keel over already. Just stay down. We know how this ends. It ends with us, alone. Made into an island overnight, cast to sea, formed without the loving care of the practiced, intent hands of creation, devoid even of the brutal temperatures and physical pressure of the entire world and ocean above. We woke up one morning, and that was it. The world went to shit and all we got was this half-assed stay at home order. It ends with feeling like, I call my friends, we play games and laugh, we make meager conversation about the birds at our windows. It ends with feeling like: I changed my shirt but I’ve been wearing the same sweatpants for seven, eight, nine days; like everyone I love is a collection of pixels; like I haven’t spoken to my sister in three months. It ends with feeling like, I’m talking to myself, and we’re all laughing about it. It ends with me thinking, damn, I wish it had been San Andreas, I wish it had been gamma rays, I wish it had been an army of Megalodons—then, at least, I could complain. Because, now, I’m not really alone, right? I’m fine. (We’re fine, except for the people who are not fine, because they’re dead, or worse, left behind by the dead, but we don’t talk about them. The dead or the not-dead. It’s impolite.) The shore is right there: They’re right there. I close my eyes and we’re Pangea again, almost. But I wake up anxious, and I miss my people’s ugly faces and sweaty hands and too-loud laughs and pointless, frustrating conflicts that come from being too much in the same space, and I miss being able to walk out of a room and not carry them with me in my pocket, in my heavy heart, and they’re right there, on my little black-screened rectangle of miracle and death, and it ends with feeling like, my island is unmoored, I’m drifting right over the edge of the world. Goodbye! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I wish that it was worse. I’m just saying, I wish that we couldn’t ignore that it is worse, these pandemic days. We have a stranglehold on normalcy, and
Poets and Writers Coalition Quarant-Zine Spring 2021
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