Onward

How was your weekend, sweetie darlings? I do hope you found some form of R & R. I’m hanging on to every bit of good news I receive, but even those tend to be tainted by the pandemic.

I got word, or rather a picture at first, of a friend who had gotten married. How wonderful is that? Absolutely champagne-popping good news! But my next thought, one I should not have let in but which gatecrashed quite unceremoniously was: we don’t get to celebrate this. She said we absolutely would Once This Is Over, and I wish that were true, but I just don’t know.  

We're all amassing celebrations that didn’t get the party that was planned or the occasion called for. Some keep postponing festivities. Some are making due, observing as best as they can under present circumstances. It’s been disappointing at best and utterly depressing at worst, and that’s just the way it is. What we’re used to doesn’t apply. But it ain’t fair doesn’t fly. I know some perfectly stable adults who’ve thrown temper tantrums a two-year-old would gawk at in reverent approval. I’m sure my nostrils have flared, like really flapped as I fumed, trying to breathe in calm and breathe out some oh-hell-naw. You do what you gotta do to remain sane.

But let’s not postpone life. Let’s keep celebrating the big things and the small. Let’s keep living in the here and now. Let’s not yield a single moment of our time, because we won't get those moments back, ever. We don’t get to live them Once This Is Over; that’s another world we'll live in when we get there.

It’s September 14, 2020, a perfectly mundane Monday or the most important day of your life, and somewhere a clock is ticking.