3 years ago, i was broken up with at a park a few blocks northeast from my apartment on the sunday morning before SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 lockdown started that night on stolen Dxʷdəwʔabš Lands
it was a sunday.
3 years ago,
i was broken up with
at a park a few blocks
northeast
from my apartment
on the sunday morning
before covid-19 lockdown
started that night
on stolen Dxʷdəwʔabš Lands
march 8th, 2020
here is the saddest heartbreak poem
i can write in this pandemic,
in one sentence:
the day you broke up with me,
i was going to give you
a large bottle of
hand sanitiser
& a brand new container
of eco-friendly
disinfectant wipes.
— written on april 7th, 2020.
written on march 8th, 2022 —
key words:
daylight savings time, or whatever. we talked at 3am, and i was confused, because i swore just a second ago, it was 1am. they had fallen asleep; they had a headache.
it was a sunday.
the song that i started playing on my phone as i walked up the hill to that park.
my now-ex complimenting my baggy black sweatpants after they broke up with me. since i knew the conversation wasn't going to be good, for the first time, i didn't bother at all to dress up to see them, & they had asked to meet with ten minutes' notice, because we both knew this wasn't going to go anywhere anymore. "they're cool," they said, as i sat, cross-legged, on the grass in front of the playground. there were huge holes in the inner thigh areas of both legs. "why would you think they're cool, they have holes in them." they thought i was so "cool", yet they broke up with me. i threw the pants away because of this conversation a few months later, but i actually wish i still had them, in a, iwanttolovemyselfandthatsadself way. i own only one pair of pants now, because every pair of sweatpants i get develops holes in the inner thigh area {and i'm fine with that now, i really am. i love myself, & in theory, from the point of view that acknowledges body shame & white supremacy & gender rules & everything else, i love my body.}. and even that pair was free.
buy 4, get 1 bánh mì
crying while driving off the west seattle bridge before it got closed because it turned out it had been structurally unstable for years & work-from-home for the covid-19 pandemic was the white lesbian mayor's prime opportunity to reveal that
staring at that same view that i was first introduced to in march 2013
it turned out that that would be the last day i would ever drive that car
the {many} years i lived in seattle were the loneliest of my entire life, & i could lie & tell you i don't know why i lived there for so long, but i do
to live so long in a place that never felt like home, isn't even metaphor
note —
this context is significant: on January 21st, 2020, the CDC confirmed that the first known covid-19 case in colonizer-coercively-called usameriKKKa, was on Coast Salish Lands ["snohomish county" in "seattle" metropolitan area, "washington state"]. immediately, all the panicked, mostly white ["seattle" is majority white], people bought out all the sanitation supplies from stores.
so by march 7th, 2020, everything, everywhere, was sold out: hand sanitizer, disinfectant, disinfectant wipes, etc.
so for me to be willing to give away half of my stash, that i had acquired coincidentally right before february/march 2020, on march 8th, 2020, was a sacrifice for me.
especially since before march 2020, i had never spent a single brain cell thinking about hand sanitizer. ever. { lol 😭 [sob emoji] }
until i saw two bottles in [redacted] in mid-february 2020, & i just... took them.
& that is how i ended up with two bottles of hand sanitizer on march 8th, 2020.
*btw, covid-19 is primarily airborne. transmission via contact with surfaces is not as common as the media reported in the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, but it can still happen.
continue to wash your hands bc you generally just should, but
covid-19 is primarily airborne.