Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 8 minutes (2,043 words)
Call it a dystopia, call it the apocalypse, whatever it is, the fact is, right now, we all have the capacity to kill each other. It's not an exaggeration, it's just a fact: We are literally holding each other's lives in our hands. In a pandemic, every single person's actions have the most extreme consequences for every single other person. I'm not sure how you can get more serious than that. I'm not sure how people can STILL not take that seriously.
Fuck. It's hard to express anger without just expressing it. The second you write it down it loses that volatility. How do I convey the rage I'm feeling right now watching families continue to gather together, watching friends clandestinely meeting, laughing like they aren't responsible for the rising death toll? Should I do it in physiological terms? Ok, I'll list the symptoms like an illness, since that's what we're working with right now: Shallow breath, rapid heart rate, adrenalin. A fucking waterfall of expletives. Shaking. I'm literally shaking with rage. My face is permanently scrunched, my throat twisted, like I'm perpetually getting ready to scream — to shout and kick and yell and punch. Or maybe an analogy works better. Feral animals, threatened and fearful, can explode into bouts of wild insanity. One minute they're calm, the next they're thrashing and biting, their eyes bulging and unseeing, their entire body a fist. Blind rage: Uncontrolled, undirected, unstoppable.
I saw all of those unctuous half-naked bodies packed onto a sweltering beach in Australia, knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all the humid holes in the ground packed together in Iran, awaiting the same number of dead bodies. I saw all those stupid drunk kids in bars in the U.K. knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all those abandoned nursing homes in Spain full of the same number of scared seniors left to die on their own.
But I'm not feral. So I just sit here, in the most populous city in Canada, simmering. And when I walk outside, when I run on the road, and I see a park full of people, or strangers face to face, I fucking stare. And I fucking shake. And I don't say, "What the FUCK are you doing?" Because when I'm told to stay away for everyone's health, I do. Even if they don't. Even if they are the 20 percent who believe this is all blown out of proportion, who have the power to sink the 80 percent of us who don't. Even if they are the reason we went from 90 percent of coronavirus cases spread by travel to 90 percent spread by community. In an apocalypse, a stranger can be a comfort. In a pandemic, they're nothing but a threat. The community that is left is found in the human beings who distance themselves, not for themselves alone, but for everyone else. Maybe so many people don't get it because it's a human paradox: That the further apart we are, the closer we become. Read more of this post
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