nowadays

by Susan Weber

I just spent ninety minutes sitting on my bum here in my recluse attic—ingesting news, composing words, dutifully distancing in place. I’m a lucky person so far.

So far. That’s a telling turn of phrase as it morphs into the distant future maybe-land we once knew and hope to know again. Hug-land. Friend-land. Swim-land. Laugh around the table with an IPA or Cabernet in hand Land. Travel when and where you want Land. It all seems so far away.

I hear the birds, noshing on the food I put out yesterday—or maybe they’re telling me the feeder’s run dry. So I get up and do my duty. They’re the one congregation I can physically care for nowadays.

Nowadays, like so far, takes on meanings it wasn’t built to handle. Now a day’s worth of oxygen floods my lungs, now a day’s nutrition is available. Now, a day’s been wasted trampling the news underfoot, tigress pacing solitary cell. Now a daze sets in because my digital devices listen and look as all my senses waste away. Now, a daisy shoots up tender sprouts in the garden I will tend alone. That’s not new, but it feels new now.

Nowadays we’re all together in a danger zone we never saw coming, not because the seers didn’t warn us, but communally we didn’t want to know. We the privileged ones were busy living loud and free into the far off nowadays you don’t prepare for, no matter how responsible you try to be. Eternal nowadays, ephemeral at best, are defined by the soul who drinks them in, confident the well cannot run dry. Why would it ever if it never has before? So far, goes the reasoning, our overweening confidence has turned out well.

So far. Nowadays. I wonder, we wonder, what comes next.


Photo by Dario Sanches CC BY-SA 2.0