By Sebastián H. Páramo, PhD
I wake up and it’s the summer of 2020. It’s past noon and we live in a new house. The only thing certain this month is that we will still be unpacking. Before bed each night, we ask each other, what are the plans for tomorrow? Can we settle into the reality of our pandemic?I check my email for news. Sometimes, I’ll mark emails as spam or hit unsubscribe if another corporation makes mention of the phrase, in these uncertain times. I go online searching for a new filing cabinet to reorganize what I’d packed away long before these uncertain times. It’s time to find the one. I browse furniture websites, I filter my results by price, height, or number of drawers. I’m amazed when they offer wheels or legs. Is this joy? Is there a button I can press to express this feeling?
I know all the devices are listening. I don’t mind because they have become helpful. They show me ads that tell me: I want. I tell myself it’s helping me fill this new home. This is something I can control. Here and now, because I won’t go outside or ask anyone to come over to help.One day, in the next room, I hear the NPR station announce that Disney World is reopening and I know other people will go if it’s open. It’ll be fine, they say. I pick up my phone and Google the rising numbers. There’s no reaction button for the COVID numbers, but my face frowns in response. No one will ever see my face’s response unless I broadcast it. Of course, I hit the thumbs up when someone frowns in a way I would. Other nights, I go down the well of videos, news sites, and graphs with hard facts. Daily cases. Daily deaths. I lie awake in bed at night, unnerved by people’s resolve to walk into theme parks. The other day, I walked into a grocery store, masked, and headed straight to the baker’s aisle to get the missing ingredient for a pie. (A small source of joy that made me want to tap the heart emoji into the bag of sugar I purchased.) The shopping music is interrupted, in these times, we’re all in this together. A notification pings through from the writers’ group chat I’m in. We find comfort in our inside jokes, our distractions. We commiserate over family deaths. Work drama. The nest of birds that squeak outside our window. Perhaps, we hear them more often now. We say, we respect the birds. We laugh about the birds. We L-O-L. I heard on the news the other day about birds migrating across North America, enjoying our stay-at-home orders. I recall the cranes I saw weeks ago while driving through neighborhoods, late one evening. We were house hunting. They were perhaps stopping by on their way north. There is no button for spotting a crane in your neighborhood. There is just you and the bird.
Before bed, I stream something on Hulu and the commercials are speaking to me again about these uncertain times. I am terrified when the Applebee’s tells me “Welcome Back.” If I could react to this in real life, in real time, I’d hit the angry emoji. Let it burn red for however long I have to stay inside. On Twitter I like someone’s post if it takes me away, again, from the present. What else is there to talk about these days when it’s always umbrellaed by a pandemic and the inequalities it reveals? I look for things to heart-react to all the time. On Instagram, I pan through friends' social justice posts, reminding everyone about the difficult times we live in. I donate and reshare to remind everyone else where my head is living. In the morning, I receive a text from our friends who have become our neighbors. There’s a picture of a newborn and this is joy. For this joy, I hit the heart emoji, all day long because it is hope and it is always certain that I will find it somewhere, as long as the well is deep and there are people pressing forward with life, even if they are infants, unaware of the burden they will inherit.
BIO
Sebastián Hasani Páramo is a CantoMundo Fellow. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Missouri Review, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, Pleiades, North American Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, among others. He is the founding editor of THE BOILER. He has received scholarships and awards from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. He holds a PhD in English and creative writing at the University of North Texas and will be the 2021 Jesse H. Jones Fellow through the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program, sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters.
