I just went for a walk around the neighborhood and saw almost no one.
And I realized that while I don't yet miss my close friends and family and usual community that much (sorry folks, this doesn't mean I don't love you), what I do miss is the openness that comes from the chance encounter. The people I don't know. The unexpected. The feeling of community that comes...unintentionally.
Life inside is like a closed system - a set of established relationships, on-purpose communications, programmed algorithmic interactions. Many of these are good, but something is missing.
We are each other's potential undoing right now - possible carriers of something that could bring the other down, links in a network of transmission.
But what I find I miss is the other part of our undoing, the opening, the loosening of our hold on ourselves that happens when we go out into the unplanned, the unnecessary.
I feel like I can be in good, deep, real relationship with people I can't see in person. But I don't know how to create the chance encounter without walking out the door.
Image: Postcard purchased at Cherokee Print Bazaar, 2018