Waiting for What?

This should be simple.

This should be simple.

This should be child's play.

But it isn't. The idea of taking the public bus to the post office is terrifying me, an adult woman who once faced the world boldly. Now the idea of posting my property tax payment on the very last day for the postmark has frozen me to the sidewalk. Two buses have pulled over, waited, then left.

Today is the deadline. It must be postmarked today. I stopped driving because I couldn't trust entering the premises of any gas station. And I'm not able to contemplate sharing the inside of someone else's car. I had a friend who rode with someone a year ago, and both ended up in the hospital, one of them died. The person who was the passenger.

Even a year out, a glance at an exposed face sends me into panic. Lips, teeth, smiles, frowns, a mouth, they are ugly, massive, blaring things, exposing breath and germs and spewing bacteria and death. What may have once been comforting has become terrifying. My body turns inward, my breath stalls, my shoulders pull forward, my jaw sets hard. And then I flee, the beginning of my paranoia. Get out, get away my mind cries, eyes dart for a way out. Behind my masked face I no longer feel protected, because all these other mouths are flopping open, freely, unresponsively.

A year alone, blockading community and communication from human contact has warped me. My family is upset I still refuse to come visit. They want to believe everything should be back to normal. While once I sought their touch, needed the warmth of others, all thought of contact is an anathema to my sanity.

Is it my fourteen months of isolation, dreading becoming or contributing to another becoming a statistic? Or have I had a permanent rearrangement in the balance of my humanness? For how many centuries have we wandered around as a species basing everything on our invincibility against the rest of nature? And now, I sense danger on every sidewalk, sign, hand rail, food encased in plastic or piled in the produce section. How many people have touched them on its way to market?

Public transportation, the bathrooms in cafes and grocery stores, seating in churches and theaters. I'm nauseous. The goodness that had been evolving in my village, deletion of plastic and trash, everyone bringing their own bags and containers, reusable coffee cups, shared potlucks and bottles of wine, crowded spaces in parks, galleries, events, all blown away in the pestilence of the past year's pandemic. We're dedicated to plasticizing the world again, desperate for this protection. I'm wearing plastic gloves at this moment in time.

How do I move?

This week I practiced all the steps. My sister suggested that I should try this small task, her concern for me growing the longer she has had to transport my prepackaged groceries from the health food co-op. Fourteen months has been too long, she tells me. You need to start doing things for yourself, stop depending on me to risk my life to make sure you are not risking yours.

You go to the co-op weekly, is what I tell her. You feel you are invincible. You are doing this already. Picking up the boxes already packed and dropping them off on my front porch seems simple to me. That's all you need to do. I'll do all the rest.

What rest?

Taking the boxes into my garage and setting everything on the six foot table I scrub down before and after. Cleaning each container carefully with the recommended mixture of bleach and water. Setting them on the kitchen counter, separated, to air dry.

Then preparing food from scratch. The less people who have touched anything the better, and that includes prepared meals by others. It's the thought of anyone actually touching the insides of packages that sickens me.

I have lost thirty pounds this year because of how often I have not been able to eat. The thought of anyone else breathing on anything that I will put in my body, and my stomach cramps, my guts cramp.

Just thinking about the breathing of the billions of people on this planet, the billions of animals, the detritus that they are spewing out into the atmosphere, causing diseases that are designed to lead to our extension. This I worry about.

The sidewalk stays in one place. I am what must move. I remember a teacher telling me that if you are having a hard time freeing yourself to take an action, plot it out carefully. Find the hardest part, the worse part, and do it first.

Getting on a bus. The hardest part.

What would make it almost bearable? Very few people on the bus and the driver maintaining that everyone where masks. The past two buses had people on them without masks, I could see through the window.

If the bus will work, then actually stepping up and putting money in the box.

Then finding a seat. Would I have to sit? If I am wearing plastic gloves, which of course I am, could I stand, holding onto a bar?

And then if the bus takes me to where the post office is, can I get off the bus? Can I face the post office? Will there be other people in the post office, will people be wearing masks, or will others be laughing, communing, patting backs, telling stories, sharing their spewing stinking air, the gusts of spit and breath coming from their lungs and guts?

Would I take the bus only to find the post office the hardest part?

Today. I set myself the task today of leaving the house, taking the bus and posting this check. As though I have something to prove.

To whom? To myself, to the bus driver, to my adult son? To my sister?

I'm not sure. I'm not sure of anything. I stand here on the sidewalk, plastic on my hands, my double masks hiding my face, dark glasses hiding my eyes, my heart pounding as I work myself up into what?

The bus is turning the corner, I watch it approach. The driver is waiting to see me raise my hand, a signal that I want to ride. He isn't wearing a mask.

I stand on the sidewalk, waiting.

When will it end?

Will it end?