Coping Mechanisms
At the edge of the apocalypse, we all make jokes
about it being the apocalypse, we all carry
hand sanitizer in little bottles to trivia night at the bar
and then, after we high five, give our red, ravaged knuckles
a squirt and we can’t help but notice how the drunk girl
who gives us a high five puts her dirty mitts all over
the bottle and drops a bead of it on the floor. At the edge
of the apocalypse we learn about our inability
to spell “sanitizer” and how autocorrect doesn’t like
the real spelling, anyway. At the edge of the apocalypse
we read helpful comics about talking to your child
about the apocalypse, emphasizing
how children rarely experience severe symptoms, emphasizing
how mommy and daddy can call their doctor
if they experience severe symptoms, chasing away
the image of that jagged, mountainous graph we saw online
that compared the number of hospital beds here and in Italy,
and we try not to remember the sound of our parents’ hushed voices
when Dad got sick, their arguments about money and how
we cried ourselves to sleep every night and in the morning, red-eyed,
pulled ourselves together, telling no one. At the edge
of the apocalypse we note the quiet in the streets. Our hands
become chapped and bloody over the knuckles. We debate
the value of washing our hands again. We wash our hands again.
We reschedule things with an asterisk or a bullet and we try
to distract ourselves with political arguments on Facebook, as if
there can be any distraction, as we count the number of friends
we have who are uninsured, who can’t work from home, who work
retail or in the service industry, who touch bodies all day,
who work in healthcare, who need masks and gloves more
than we do and we set up our computers for Skype,
and we google “homeschool lesson plans” and we clean out
our offices so that we will have a door to close,
because it feels like something we can control. We sneeze
into our elbows and then bump elbows as a greeting. We open doors
with the cuffs of our coats and wonder if we should wash them
every time we come home. We strain our cheeks with weird,
false smiles as we pack our children onto the school bus,
making a useless pantomime at normality and we wonder
how our great-grandparents handled the Spanish flu and then
we remember how great-grandma died in childbirth
the year before and how years later our grandfather tried
to run away from the father who sold his favorite horse,
from the father who beat him, and we remember how our grandfather
once described sleeping in a bathtub, sleeping on a submarine
as it dove, the walls caving in. How it all began with optimism:
a desire to murder Hitler. How he once gave out cigars and booze,
though he never drank, as the submarine filled up
with water, and how — even though he survived —
there was a silence in him after, always. And we pull our babies
into bed with us, noting the poor social distancing, noting
the runny nose, and we do it anyway,
at the edge of the apocalypse, kissing not their lips
but the sweet crowns of our children’s heads.
