Dear Alex, How are you in Chicago? In the news today I only see New York, New York, and New York, where exhausted nurses and exhausted doctors and failing systems can’t cope with much more as everyone catches the coronavirus and I can’t imagine Chicago is that far behind because it’s also a big city, the Big Apple of the Midwest so maybe it’s more like the Big Corn or something or maybe I’ll just go with Carl Sandburg and the Hog Butcher for the World but I digress. Perhaps you don’t know. You are staying home at least. This I know from your mom who is talking to my mom over text like everything else these days it’s online little faces in little boxes full of ticky tacks none of it seems very real sometimes it’s as if it has all vanished except for this little glowing box and me in a bigger box with windows and sunlight and starlight and clouds sometimes, another little screen, or maybe a big screen, like the one in your basement where we played Zelda: Breath of the Wild over winter break but that wasn’t very real either. But what do I know about what is real now? Indoors and outdoors and I know you have clouds, I am sorry it is still so cold outside for you, that on top of all else you must deal with the gray winter and no school no don’t torture your sister too badly even if you’re bored I saw you on that last video call pulling her cheeks you are older, after all, but I am older than you and who am I to say anything against screaming. I understand the length of days now. The horror of time passing when I don’t know how to be useful and the hours run into hours run into hours until I finally sleep again and wake to more hours and little boxes full of people full of ticky tacks and sometimes it’s not enough to just be to just be healthy, safe, and free how dare I ask for sanity too when so many have so little? We are lucky. You, too. I was thinking of giving blood today just to do something do anything in the face of little tiny specks of disease but I live with Nainai as you live with your Nainai and Yeye who is also our Waipo and Waigong I was thinking of giving blood today and went so far as to look it up, see what action means today click click and my fingers get exercise I hope you grow up to live in a world of hands and palms. I suppose that’s my job, my generation’s job to make it so in the next ten years. But now I’m remembering it’s more like eight or even seven because you’re in fifth grade already and getting bigger and maybe you already know what it feels like when it’s hard to act and it’s hard to sit at home and sometimes the world no longer fits into the little boxes full of ticky tacks you want it to fit in. I’m sorry. Then again, Butcher is the right word for it. Butcher and I digress but butcher the knife that carves swathes across America butcher the nations butchered responses botched reactions Butcher-in-chief the knife the knife the knife that cuts swathes across America and the world and scythes down the doctors, the helpers, the poor, the hungry, those that managed until recently and maybe then it will finally come for the rich eat the rich but we’ve already eaten everyone else, who’s left to do the eating. Cannibalism is a word too, you know. So who knows what will happen tomorrow. My father, your favorite people, he says he wishes life were like cutting papaya, just a slick slice through the flesh and the chink of knife against porcelain so easy, so smooth, and perhaps this is what that’s like and perhaps we are lucky to have papaya-smooth lives but I don’t know if that can be true in the presence of so much fear. Fear for you. Fear for grandma and grandma and grandpa and thank god we don’t have to fear for the dead too but I try not to don’t think about it too much it’s all outside our little boxes and maybe in the box somewhere there’s still room for love. Courage is a word too, and it comes from coeur or heart in French I bet you take Spanish it’s far more useful but it’s lovely to do something just for the beauty of it. Coeur. Courage, Alex, courage that I do not have, that I don’t think anyone truly has but enough to push the humming live wires of what if what if what if away and I hope Zelda is enough to keep the dark at bay for now but when that fails I will still listen for your laughter over Facetime even if it’s all that is left. But I digress how are you how are you how are you? Good bad up down sideways green blue red electric? So many days to feel through. Love, Anna Anna Zheng is currently holed up in her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia where her primary quarantine hobby is napping. She is taking a gap year and spends her unscheduled time writing, singing, birdwatching, participating in theatre things, and procrastinating on projects. Mostly procrastinating. COVID willing, she will be joining Stanford '25 next year where she tentatively plans to major in creative writing.
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About MeHi! I'm Andrea. I really like words. Categories
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