Is It June Yet?

Practicing one day at a time when the future seems so damn close.

I got my first vaccine shot on Friday. When I signed in at the Armory, Washington Height's massive indoor track and field facility, I didn’t understand that the woman at reception wanted me to first wave my fist under a thermometer and instead thought she was trying to give me a fist bump. To be fair, it was the first time I had stepped into an enclosed space with hundreds of other human beings in more than a year and I felt over-stimulated, scattered, overwhelmed. After a few seconds of silliness and laughter, I successfully had my temperature taken. She handed me my paperwork, reached out her fist and we finally landed that bump, her skin touching mine for a brief moment.

“Gracias,” I said.

“De nada, mi nena,” she said, her eyes crinkling with a smile.

I began to tear up at the recognition that the small moment of physical and emotional connection with this 60-something-year-old Dominican woman was the first I’ve had with someone outside my pod in a long time. This is one of the first of many steps I’ll be taking to re-enter this new world we are building, one I’m hopeful will serve up moments of grace beside what is sure to be many awkward social fumbles.

I felt so free leaving our apartment with Ben for our appointments. I wore a cute shirt and matched my earrings to my outfit and shoes with leather soles instead of my sneakers and house slippers. I ran for the subway on the platform for the first time in more than a year. We sat on a park bench and ate bagels and coffee from a cart as we people watched after our shots. I read Smelling the Wind, a poem by self-proclaimed “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde, on our ride home. I noticed my favorite ginkgo tree sprouting its tea green leaves, something I used to track day-by-day on my former commute. For the first time in more than a year, life was happening all around and I was part of it.

The New Yorker recently ran an Emily Flake cartoon of a woman who is worried she is so irrevocably changed by the pandemic that she will have to make her peace with a future reality defined only by mumus and social awkwardness. Although I don’t mind the prospect of the mumus, and can’t see a future where I resubmit to underwire bras, I relate to that cartoon. I am changed. I cannot return to a world of meaningless small talk, of avoiding eye contact on the subway, of keeping up with the hustle culture that I barely kept up with in this past year when hustling meant just going from my bedroom to my laptop in the other room.

Most of all, just as I am afraid I won’t like this new world come June when I am fully vaccinated, I am also afraid it won’t like me. I’m as anxious of this reentry as I am excited to welcome it. Like an ouroboros eating its own tail, these two energies feed off one another, willing me to bite off the new while still metabolizing the old.

I called my sponsor months ago and told her about this fear I have inside, the fear of the unknown, the fear I won’t be able to keep up, the fear I will be seen as ugly, changed.

She listened patiently, letting me purge my fears all over the telephone line, until I cried myself out and paused and she said, with a smile carried by her voice over the phone line:

“Is it June yet, Carla? All we have is one day at a time, Carla. One day at a time.”

And she is, of course, right. If there has been one constant lesson in my life for the past 16 months, it’s that we don’t know what the future holds. All I have is this very moment. All I can do is practice being in this world in its current form—getting comfortable with the new me I have become and practice how to be from the grace-filled confines of my apartment walls until the time comes to enter the energy of the subway, the blooming wild around us, and the energy that two fists bumping can launch into this world, one day at a time.