Flash Nonfiction: The pandemic hit us (and some called it a kiss)

By: Cecilia Gigliotti

I’m coming to understand just how much the ongoing COVID situation has desensitized us to. Its lexicon, for example, which at first seemed impossibly foreign and now hardly registers. The widespread presence of the virus is almost universally described as having “hit.” When the pandemic hit. A choice of diction at once involuntary and far from accidental. A global health crisis strikes. It is assault. It is violence. It bruises some, batters some, kills some. It assails by numbers: longitudinal coordinates, income brackets, a tally of missed rent payments. To say nothing of how the disease itself ambushes the elderly, the immunocompromised, the unhoused, the people who were otherwise “just fine.” To say nothing of the lingering effects of long COVID for those who survive the initial onslaught.

How accustomed have we become to violence? How little does it matter to us anymore?

The more insidious forms of attack are taking a greater toll, too, as our emotional defenses wear down. Things sting that didn’t used to; small slights slip in through the cracks of the armor. Friends cancel plans last-minute, two and three at a time, leaving a week that was empty to begin with less than empty by its end. I call someone who said they’d be free and multiple tries go unanswered, unacknowledged—they’re not even online. I discover my reserves of patience are much lower than they once were. I discover my own needs staging their own assault, ramming against the insides of my ribcage. I want to be compassionate, but even I get lonely sometimes.

Then there was the perfectly innocent question, asked by someone who cared, of how my dating life was going. I blindsided us both with a Carly Simon meltdown, sobbing that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married or have children. And have you been outside, I wanted to add, have you seen what’s been happening to us? Sustaining the life I recognized was more than enough work; creating any kind of additional, adjacent life seemed inconceivable. With vaccines in Germany then still largely unavailable to my age group, I couldn’t move through a crowd without a bout of nerves, much less imagine intimacy with strangers. That the priority list was promptly scrapped and vaccines made widely available only marginally eased the unease.

This brand of anxiety was not what I had envisioned for the ripe age of twenty-five. That was not the way I’d always heard it should be, or even figured it would be. My therapist advises against the word should. I was settling into adulthood and becoming well-adjusted and all that. Oh well. The pandemic hit.

We are by now acutely, achingly conscious of how we live day to day, how there is no way to live except day to day. At the top of each new cycle of hours we have to decide what we want or need or can reasonably expect from others and from ourselves. Then we unceasingly reassess, renew, and revise those decisions. Self-attuning and constancy are the weapons in our arsenal; we would do well to deploy them in tandem. When a pandemic hits, it’s the only way to hit back.

Photo by the author: Antonplatz, Berlin.