by Michele Mekel
These are the COVID days.
March unwittingly brought them, along with spring.
These COVID days don’t come with convenient labels, like Monday or Tuesday.
That’s because COVID days are the same: wake, feed cats, make coffee, check Twitter for news.
That’s the COVID news, of course.
On COVID days, you need to know the updated infection rate and the new death toll.
You must be apprised of the latest treatment failures and the recent unemployment numbers.
COVID days also require corrections to prior days’ misinformation and outright ignorance.
And, certainly, COVID days aren’t complete without hours of zooming.
Virtually, we go to meetings and classes, happy hours and dates, birthday parties and funerals.
But the novelty of co-workers’, friends’, and potential paramours’ backgrounds has worn off.
What’s fresh, these COVID days, is that we’re all a bit more fatigued, unkempt, and absent.
Living in Happy Valley, Michele Mekel wears many hats of her choosing: writer and editor; educator and bioethicist; poetess and creatrix; cat herder and chief can opener; witch and woman; and, above all, human. Her work has appeared in
various academic and creative publications, including having her poetry selected and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She is also a co-principal investigator for the Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 project, viralimaginations.psu.edu. Michele can be found on Instagram @ShaktiEnergy.
