the endless st. patrick’s day
We’ve almost made it two weeks off one grocery store trip. That’s a new record for us, aided by a few nights of takeout, but even so, almost two weeks, almost two months in. We are “on pause,” our governor says, at least one more month. I walk around, cloth mask, meandering lines six feet apart -- that’s two sidewalk blocks, the bright pink LinkNYC sign tells us. Caught in an endless St. Patrick’s Day, the bars and pubs with green paint not even chipping in their windows, come celebrate.
St. Patrick’s Day was the one day I tried to avoid in New York. We wrote haikus, my sisters and I, about what we saw: the puke on the corner, the stumbling, the shouts. When I was 17 I took the train into the city for my high school internship on St. Patrick’s Day, armed with my big sister’s big camera, documenting the 8 am chants, the 8 am dancing, the 8 am jello shots. After 10 St. Patrick’s Days in the city it didn’t seem so pretty anymore. Now I daydream about stumbling out of the pub on the corner, a sing-a-long, arms around shoulders, friends hoisting each other up.
It’s strange to get texts and messages and emails from people around the world asking if I’m okay, asking what it’s like. The bad things don’t happen here, not since... But the last time we had a terrorist attack the subways didn’t even slow down! It’s strange to see other parts of the country saying things are okay now, saying we can come out, come out, wherever you are. I don’t think they smelled something rank while on a walk one day to see the community garden tulips and turned a corner and found the morgue trucks. We will stay in hiding. We will beat our grocery store records. Once I thought I was ready to leave the city. Now I feel tied to it forever, fiercely.
I sit with my plush bear on the couch under my arm, which I bought from the toy store up on Amsterdam, a few weeks after my cat died, just wanted someone around with me on the couch. We sit, this bear and I, “on pause.” My heart rate plummets. Yesterday it snowed. We bundle under the soft blanket. My love comes over and holds me, he kisses my forehead, his anxiety asks what’s wrong: Everything. Nothing. I tell him. This is hibernation. We’ll come out when it’s springtime and easier to survive, when we can get food every day, whatever we want, from wherever we want. Yesterday it snowed.
Still it’s strange, to be in love in the middle of all this. We work in separate parts of the cave and then he’ll come over and kiss my cheek and go back to his desk. Everything is extraordinarily surreal, and science fictive, and horrifying, and lovely. In this endless St. Patrick’s Day yesterday, as it snowed in May, he bought a bottle of scotch. We ordered cookies at 9:30, after it stopped snowing. “It’s a special occasion,” he said, as we -- him, the bear, and I -- sat on the couch, again, as he FaceTimed his family hundreds of miles away, telling them, again, yes, sure, he’ll make it back to them in July. By 11 when the cookies still hadn’t arrived we canceled the order.
Lying in bed at midnight, my arm pulled around him (”thank you,” he said), half-asleep, another night of long dreams ahead of me, I could feel, the buzzer blasts. He goes downstairs, comes back up, “Come here,” he says from the kitchen. We stand in the bright light, bleary-eyed, and, movements soft, blurred, reach into the box of cookies. They forgot our order, so instead they sent us all the cookies they had left at the end of the night. Melted chocolate chips on our lips and fingertips, we looked at each other.
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