Joy Demands to Be Felt
As “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” blared curly notes of joyful resistance to the pessimism of the COVID-quo, a young nursing student administered my first dose of my COVID vaccination.
Half-vaccinated, and feeling fine, I bobbed to the beat.
Fifteen minutes later, strutting out of the convention center, I had to check myself from tossing my face mask up into the air like a high school graduate.
My co-worker threw me a side-stare that wondered if I could perhaps be slightly less elated.
I could and would not.
It had been a long slog; a mind-winter of sorts. There had been days when the sun set too early and fears flared: that tomorrow would be the same as today.
And now, for a brief moment, I felt ready to stop masking my smile and hiding away joy in fear of its fleetingness.
If the international events, anxiety, death and suffering of this year have taught me anything it is that I am not-yet-dead. I know this because I feel it all; waves of the world passing through my body.
Sadness hides out in my hips.
News bends through me, mediated by my mind, lands as stress and burrows like a gopher in my spine.
I have seen this year play across my face kneading new grooves of worry into my forehead. On the streets of New York and San Francisco, Mexico City and Oaxaca, I’ve passed people with a new heaviness set around the eyes. I know that this year has touched them as it has me. That it has sat heavily on their shoulders, landed squarely on their chest and refused to move. I know that sometimes we’ve felt like we couldn’t breathe.
As so, I walk out of the convention center, milking a momentary sense of invincibility and a re-affirmation of my aliveness in the form of tiny “I got my COVID vaccine” sticker.
I’m feeling extravagant. I say, “Subs are on me!”
The sun is out. My coworker and I eat simple subs at the side of the duck pond and, this moment, which would have been an almost-nothing moment in the BC (Before COVID) period, now that we’ve been reminded of the unbearably beautiful lightness and improbability of being, is nothing short of perfect.
Yes, I know, that joy too will pass. But not without me feeling it first.
