Remember 2020? Heh. As if.

The first year of Covid was a weird time. I canceled all my events, rebuilt my business and marketing plan, and you guessed it, stayed home. I also quit drinking, built a new workout routine, and catapulted headfirst into my art, which turned into my primary coping mechanism to get through 2020 and 2021.

At the time, Josh and I lived in Baltimore in an 1100 square foot townhouse with three cats and a dog the size of a person. We were both working from home, and early on in the city, we were afraid to even go for walks in the very busy city parks, because everyone else was working from home too. Not to mention, in the early days, we didn’t have tests (at home or at the doctor’s office), we didn’t know how it spread, and we didn’t know how to protect ourselves, let alone how to protect others from us.

Everything was a mystery.

And so we stayed home.

The isolation was new to me. Though I’m an introvert and managed it well, I was not by any means immune to its effects. This poem reflects the new emotions I was grappling with—not just the aloneness from the separation from my community contrasted with the strangeness of having Josh around all the time, but the the sense of togetherness knowing everyone else was doing the same thing. All that, plus inability to rectify the feelings; the inability to know what to do with it all. It is an acknowledgement of this new type of aloneness that I’d never experienced before.

Better Than Dead

And so we stay home
We stay alone

We are separate, but in this together
Isolated, but never alone
Always alone and
never alone

alone alone alone

It’s strange to be alone
but also not alone
Either way, it’s
better than dead.