I got it, a week ago now. This time, my arm isn’t even sore. After the first one, I woke up two days later, with a piercing headache, nausea, and a fatigue so overwhelming that I spent the afternoon napping and went to bed at 7:30, my body so leaden it was hard even to move. The next day, I was totally fine.
On our daily walks, we meet neighbors with whom all conversation centers around “the shot.”
“When are you getting yours?”
“We got Moderna, what did you get?”
“I hear the people who got (Moderna, Pfizer, you choose) had the worst reactions.”
“My friend was in bed for two days afterward. She got the Pfzier.”
“My friend was in bed for two days afterward. He got the Moderna.”
“We had to wait two hours and drove home another two hours in second gear –the roads were so slippery.”
“I just walked in.”
“You are so lucky! I am jealous.”
“I’m going to wait until my daughter comes home this summer to get mine.”
“Now we can get together for dinner—inside!”
I should be happy. I should feel relief. I should be excited, ready to re-enter the world, if only in a limited way.
Shouldn’t I?
Again, I’ve struggled to find words for this post. I haven’t shifted gears. Despite the shots, I’m still living in this strange discordant landscape. Tired of bitter cold weather, aching from the sciatica in my left leg that tells me my old stenosis might be returning, riven by conflict between the need to create and the necessity to manage a household with all its demands, I’m exhausted. For the last fifteen years, I’ve been in residency at this time of year, lucky enough to have gotten fellowships to various wonderful places where I could settle in to read all that I have no time for now, write poems, work on my book, be fed and cared for by wonderful staff, and meet and interact with great new creative friends.
Not this year.
I wonder if my body remembers these much-needed breaks from my daily, distracted life, and its new aches are just subliminal longing for those times.
A few days ago, I received word that I’d received second prize in Connecticut’s Nutmeg Poetry Contest for this poem, written at one of those residencies. The judge said it was “a nonce poem,” which is a poem written for a particular occasion, and “the occasion is now.”
HOSTAGE
I’ve been feeling peeled, like a fruit
that needed a sharp knife. Ripped,
like the final gash in old cloth
already frayed, whispering in the dark
for soothing from something I’m not
ready to call god. The world is breaking
and I’m breaking with it. White men
in black suits making hell on earth. I
thought I’d seen the end of that,
what man can do to man, to woman.
Auschwitz, Birkenau, the Killing Fields,
bones and teeth on gritty paths, mounds
of shoes and suitcases, cyclon cans,
typed lists, numbered photographs.
Shouldn’t it all be history?
I’m too angry for metaphors, too scared
for rhyme. Savage unmothered earth
we live on now. I want to have a bottom
line, a limit to what I can bear, a scream
that says enough, a key to tenderness.
Yes, it’s the tenderness that’s missing, a universal body/soul longing. But I think the only kind of tenderness most of us feel now is a pin-cushion kind of vulnerability, a creation of fear, irritability and anguish, a loss of focus and confusion about what “normal” will be, can be, in a future in which we are all vaccinated.
And that’s a long time from today.
Sure, the second shot has given some reassurance that neither I nor my husband will fall victim to this monstrous virus, but what is the life to step back into? Everyone talks about hugging their grandchildren and I surely would love to as well, but even without a pandemic they are far away at college and high school, deeply into their own lives. And anyway, I think they would rather be hugging their girlfriends.
I still don’t feel comfortable going into a restaurant, though dinner with vaccinated friends in my home seems possible. Movies—how I loved going to the movies. Our wonderful theater remains closed. The trips I used to love to New York City are out of the question, as the things I cherished there are all off-limits—theater, museums, seeing friends, walking the streets. Travel is out of the question—where to go? Italy is my favored destination, but it’s all shut down, as is the rest of Europe. Nothing else appeals. My yoga classes are all on zoom for the foreseeable future. Everyone is wearing masks, standing away from each other, and that’s a good thing, yes, we need to do it, but it’s just plain weird, even after a year.
And then there’s the living, breathing catastrophe in Mar-A-Lago, the crazies in the House and Senate, the terrifying prospect of voting rights being curtailed.
I’m not even going there. The poem says it all.
I feel spoiled and selfish even listing these very white privileged problems—thinking about the moms and dads trying to work and school their kids, the teachers worried about going back into the classroom, bus drivers, grocery store clerks, nurses and doctors, and most of all the families who’ve lost members they’d loved, who have to look at that empty seat at the kitchen table.
But as I told another riddled-with-guilt friend recently, in my very first counseling class in grad school, the teacher began by encouraging us to remember that “nobody’s toothache hurts like your toothache.”
It’s definitely worth remembering. All of us are entitled to be anxious, grouchy, tearful, selfish. Just not to reside in misery too long.
Catastrophe does force reinvention.
And the “in-between place,” where we all are, is the hardest to be in.
And yes, lucky me, I got that second shot, after all.
***
I continue to be so uplifted and grateful for all the responses I receive to these posts, and I apologize for not getting back to all of you. And if anyone wants to watch/listen to my last library talk, it was a good one, with “girls” (now very much women) and staff from both Touchstone and Hotchkiss reading their poems and discussing what it was like to be in our writing groups. Here it is: https://www.sharoncharde.com/readings-and-interviews