The Daily Routines
We move through them like so many weighted bodies dragging through the surf. Then a virus sweeps across the globe, and old routines, old jobs, old identities, old relationships, old friendships are suddenly removed. Voided with various and unsavory labels reserved for the once politically motivated, socially active, or religiously profound. The boring drive to work, sitting in bumper to bumper traffic for two hours in and out of the city, is replaced with applying for unemployment. All those miserable souls that sat next to you in smog, are now sitting at home, wondering when the car will get repoed.
The debt you once fought so valiantly to vanquish, comes unhinged with medical emergencies, due credit card payments, utility costs to keep the lights on in the small apartment. You once were $900 dollars away from debt free liberty. Now you’re $70,000 behind on medical bills. When you were in the emergency room, shaking from a 105 degree fever, cold sweats dripping down your body, the infection ravaging your tissues, you gathered enough strength to ask, “How much…would this…emergency surgery…cost…I got laid off, and have no insurance.”
Your job becomes a badge of honor. Then returns to being a place of contention and disillusionment. Why you put yourself through this was once a question you held in your mind because of aspiring dreams of becoming a full time artist. Now, you know exactly why you report to your job: to make enough to scrape by for another two weeks…hopefully.
The food in your refrigerator looks back at you with contempt when you decide to pass and order something for delivery. The neatly packaged Tupperware reminds you, “The mac and cheese in here goes bad tomorrow.”
The people you see are no longer the people you once knew, but the asshole who isn’t wearing a mask, or the guy who drives that truck with the Confederate Flag and Trump 2020 Flag with the bumper sticker that says, “If you don't like it, leave.” There the people who swear by those labels, not because of conviction for the principles they once were founded in, but because they’re scared.
Just like everyone else.
Suddenly the world is made aware of the mortality that stalks behind them day to day, and they need some tangible concept to help them feel safe. People reach to things like politics, religion, class, nationalism,…instagram, tik tok, onlyfans. Anything to help them feel like death can’t reach them.
For the record, I’m no better.
The joke, the unyielding punchline, is that death is always a breath away. One slip on the stairs, one second too late at a red light, one ill timed inhalation with a jawbreaker away. Somewhere there’s a loved one with a plastic tube lodged in their throat to force air into struggling lungs. Somewhere, there’s a loved one who refuses to believe the virus ripping through air sacs is real.
The joke, is they both end up in the same inconclusive ending.
“Just a matter of time” I think to myself as I wish I had a cigarette.
But I don’t smoke anymore.
I’ve been sober for six years.
I workout everyday.
I watch my saturated fats.
I drink 64 oz of water daily.
8 hours of sleep.
I look in the mirror, at times, and shrug. “Just a matter of time.”
I struggle to find a reason to take care of myself until I hear the sounds of four young children giggling from the living room, one wall away.
I can’t help but acknowledge that lingering anxiety of knowing disaster is one day away. At some point in time, I’ll lose everything. I splash my face with water, then try to find some sense of positivity before I leave the bathroom.
Because I’m always on for the ones I love. There’s rarely a time when I don’t consider those around me and their observations. They’re watching me and getting a read on what life is like from my disposition. I set the tone for them, and I’ll be damned if the little ones giggling suddenly stop their shenanigans because the world has infiltrated my mind…again.
Smile, they’re watching.
I cheer my friends on as much as I can because that’s what friends do. They need that support, and I need a reason to feel like I’m contributing to the world. I wake up early, get coffee ready for myself and my wife. I tell her she’s beautiful, and admire her as she readies for work. I smile at her when she takes her glasses off before bed. I tell her goodnight, and that I love her. She rolls to her side, and drifts to sleep eventually.
The daily routines.
“Just a matter of time.” I think to myself as I settle into my chair and open my laptop. I feel like I’m steeling it. Time, I mean. That every hour that ticks by where my consciousness is allowed to roam, capture stories, write them down, rinse and repeat. These happy, unbelievably productive, and joyous times, are fleeting.
“Just a matter of time.” So I write as much as possible.
Before death finds me wandering in the woods on a hike twenty-two years from May 17th. I smile and enjoy my friends as they tell me of their lives, their goals, dreams, newest projects, and realizations. I appreciate the smiles and the tears, the laughter, and the woes, from my family. Then I write down what I can remember, and promise myself to come back and read my musings when I’m not writing new ones down.
One day, the world will blaze brilliantly on fire. The labels, the flags, the conspiracy theories, the left over mac and cheese, the coffee in the morning, it all goes up in ashes. Then new routines replace the old ones.
“Just a matter of time.”