Forty degrees with gusty winds. The sun goes down at 5:21pm tonight. I’ve been spending my mornings at the local library, a dramatic new glass building with angled struts, and it feels like I’m on a spaceship in a mid-budget space opera where there’s a glitch with the hyper-sleep.
And I’m so tired these days. I’ve been setting my alarm so I can arrive when the library opens and snag a study room even though the place stays mostly empty until noon. A young woman studies for medical school. In the far corner, an elderly man sighs over a big dusty book about trees. And I’m hunched over my notepad, trying to make a go of it, this writing thing. The twenty-first draft of my novel is coming along slowly and painfully. But it’s coming.
Nobody’s sure what they should be doing, plague-wise. Uncertainty hangs in the air alongside the virus. We’re still vaporizing each other with our voices. Our breath. But they say it’s mild now, mostly upper respiratory. But it’s still sweeping the nation and disrupting public life. They’re still making alarming charts. No matter how this shakes out, uncertainty is here to stay, and how do you learn to live with that? Meanwhile, I’m keeping an eye on the statistics again, wondering if we’ll go to London next month.
