A dispatch from Before
Friends, what a week. Mexico has 41 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with no community transmission reported yet. Schools are closing for a month starting on Friday, and the government has recommended canceling all non-essential activities from March 23 to April 19. Luckez and I are ready to #canceleverything starting March 23 or the instant community transmission is reported. If a more intense quarantine becomes necessary, we’re ready for that too. We will do everything we can to flatten the curve and give Mexico’s already fragile public health system a fighting chance.
In the meantime, however, I am losing it. I want to trust that we have another week of normal life, but I also find it hard to believe the pandemic will follow a convenient timeline. I feel like everything could change at literally any minute, and waiting for it has me incredibly anxious and on edge. I’m sort of managing to work and write, but it’s really, really hard. Being able to see a catastrophe lumbering toward you but not being sure when it will arrive—or, worse, not knowing if it has already arrived—I mean, is there a mindset less conducive to concentration and creativity and everything else I usually value and strive for? At this point, a quarantine is sounding pretty good. At least then I would know what to do.
The feeling is similar to the one I had after the September 2017 earthquake. Walking around then, it felt like the city I knew had suddenly disappeared—the buildings that used to stand where there was now only rubble, the parties I went to in homes that were now uninhabitable, the stores I used to shop in that had to shutter and move, the safety and security I didn’t even realize I had taken for granted. All those things were suddenly gone, and of course that was sad and strange. But chillingly, it also felt like they had never really existed. The things I remembered had contained the seeds of their own destruction. They had always already been gone. I had been living among ghosts all along, and I hadn’t realized it.
We’re still going out to lunch and making plans to see friends this week. The school behind our building will be filled with kids for one more week. Street vendors are still selling everything from tlacoyos to shoe shines to puppets on our neighborhood’s corners. The market and the grocery store are still buzzing in the normal way, not the panicked way. But I know this reality is already gone. I know we’re ghosts, haunting the people we will be in a day, a week, a year. This time, I know.
My writing
As everyone contemplates society ending, I wrote about one of the ways it first formed: sports.