The Summer of Our Discontent

The other day, I popped into my office at work. I rarely go in there, now--I am in the library only one week in every three, and the work is non-stop, so my office serves only as a bolthole to which I retreat to shove a hastily-grabbed lunch down my gullet before returning to the often exhausting efforts of supporting curbside work. 

Anyway. My office has a faintly abandoned air about it, unsurprisingly. I had simply popped in to see if I could find some pens, and was on my way back out when my eyes happened to land on the coat rack by my door. Dangling there, forlorn and completely useless at this point in the year, was a scarf. I had probably hastily slung it there, back during the week of March 9, and then forgot it before I left for my long weekend vacation. The one I never took, because the world ended and our Library closed. So that scarf remained there as winter turned to spring, and spring melted into summer--four months ago, but honest to god, it feels like a hundred years ago.

I stood there for a moment, almost dizzy with discombobulation, before shrugging it off and soldiering on. My world has dwindled to focusing on the current day, the current task, the current duty. I answer emails, I do schedules, I try to support my colleagues, I binge watch television, I sleep, and I mourn the old life, the old routines, and I wonder if we will ever go back to that. But introspection is a dangerous, depressing venture that frankly, I don't feel equal to embarking upon. 

It's July now. Outside, it's hot, hot, stupidly hot, and the sun shines relentlessly in a brassy sky. It's been rather dry, too, this summer. My country has lost its goddamned mind and a very vocal segment of the population feels that bowing to mask mandates to preserve public health will lead to the mark of the beast or a microchip or something, and when they are not busy protesting masks, they are denying the existence of historic and current systemic inequity and racism. COVID-19 cases are absolutely skyrocketing and my sisters live in Florida and I'm worried to death for them. And while each brutally hot, suffocating day seems to drag on and on, I know that in a moment I will blink and three months (aka ten years) will pass and autumn will be upon us. And we will still be stuck in this pattern because 'MURICA. 

I'm hot, I'm tired, I'm scared, and I don't know how we are going to make it through this.

Welcome to the summer of our discontent.