COVID – Death of the ‘Full-stop’

We feel so much pain to lift our feet and step into tomorrow which already seems like yesterday or the day before, just when we thought we were winning this, Spring came as usual and we ran to the trees and shook them hard for the last hanging lazy leaves to fall and buried ourselves under heaps of them, we came out covered in colours, and ran straight to the river to take a holy dip, say a prayer, then we sat for hours hearing stories about our future from overworked politicos, an optimistic bunch who are simply doing their job of selling a very boring future perilously predicated on collective indecisions, a career they never knew they would have when as children they went to bed at night with goodness in their hearts, some of us went in search of lost work, some went in search of love, you and I literally fell in love at first sight because we could only see each other’s smiles through our eyes, lip read the hellos through our eyes and felt the first trembling touch of our hands through our eyes and those eyes must have looked gorgeous doing all of that with just one glance! By the time we took our masks off, we were older by a year, our faces felt nude, our smiles seemed out of place, and the unmuffled hellos sounded clamorous! We wore them back on, everyone reprogrammed their media feeds, we couldn’t be held hostage to endless content of dark comedy anymore, we stepped out for fresh air and who knew would return home gasping for it, the day when air became gold and money became dirt, the outdoors became so dark to give one a fit of giggle out of horrific fear, the young ones filled their plan books, wrote the last page of it, bought their future online that eventually did not arrive, they rechecked the plan books to understand what went wrong, it seems they wrote the same plans over and over again and while they did that each time their voices sank to whispers of despair that will remain testament of their youth, some people have sat for so long they don’t know how to stand again, some have stood so long their backs don’t bend anymore, children picked up where you left off, they took your seat and plugged in the computer to recharge and pressed the ‘enter’ button to adulthood, they refused to dress up at home unlike their parents and showed up anyway stinking like scum, they resisted playing pretend behind a camera, those young ones preferred the real virtual world where they smash the skulls of barbaric enemies with weapons traded in gems and diamonds, they bicycled to the end of the town where the lake has pulled over a patchwork blanket of green lily pads, waiting for the grasshoppers and summer rain, the children never came back home, no one expected them to, if they are alive then home is where they stand when it all stops, people ate to pass time and people starved before time caught up with the speed of the spreading maladies, one did not say goodbye to anyone in over a year because they never left and are always around , and some never got a chance to say goodbye to those who left forever, some hiked deep into the forest and wished they came out into a world restored, the clocks stopped no one noticed, it took no time for the world to change, most died before time and those who lived did not know what to do with all the time, most have lost their memories while some have written down every detail of their days spent in limbo