The days skim by in a blink and a breath.
Too fast to count or notice.
Although each is different and unique in some of their happenings, they still blend together in the end, making it difficult to keep track of when was the last time I did this or said that — with the exception of pinpointing a specific date that often feels like yesterday but in truth has been the better part of a week.
Lockdown life no longer exists. It’s just life. Same as in the southern states of America where there is no sweet tea. It’s just tea — and its blasphemous cousin: unsweet tea.
I am staying as true to this course as I can amidst the tumultuous times with its mix of redundant moments and restricted freedoms.
And through these uncertain days, the current of my life pulls me forward.
I am free in my cage to be sure, but it is still a cage. The bars are seen clearly in every interaction, every drop of sweat, every passage of one moment to the next.
Rumors of flights opening swirl as they have for the last four months. Talk of going to this place or that location have dulled into side conversations and wishful thinking.
Virus cases pop up from time to time causing a swirling whirlwind of frenzied responses in the form of closed shops, new calls for facade protection with ineffective preventative measures, and the spark of fearful chatter on street corners and in digital messages.
“Smoke and mirrors and bamboo sticks,” we say.
No matter. The current continues to guide me forth.
I write, I edit, I spend time with those who mean the most in this once foreign land that is now a place of familiarity and love.
I visit the slums at least once a week to see my friend and his mother — and to experience the elusive freedom that the people of poverty have somehow found, evidenced in the smiles across their dirt-smeared, bright faces.
I return when the time calls to Mother Ganga, submerging my feet in her waters, a single hand in her flow, asking how she is that day, then silently offering the only prayer I know worth its weight in words.
These are my days, consisting of a richness I can’t explain where — as the sun plots its course for the coming morrow — the people I know and the connections I have made serve as anchors in the now.
For they too are my current.
And I can do nothing but smile as they sweep me along to new and hopeful destinations in the same moments we have lived countless times before.