The last Friday night in through the looking glass.

I think a lot about that last Friday night dinner with friends. About how many lasts that night contained and how we had no clue that they would be lasts at all.

There were, of course, the murmurs of impending change. David travelled for work earlier that week and I distinctly remember feeling like I was in the opening scenes of a historical drama, wrangling H into a fresh diaper on our bed in the faint blue of early morning, the clock radio playing the day’s news softly in the background. It was even a topic of conversation at the dinner itself.

That night we sang the words of Kabbalat Shabbat together, our children at our feet. We crowded around a slightly too-small table and shared the food that each of us had brought. The room teemed with conversation, one conversation breaking into many smaller conversations and then running together again. David held our friends’ newborn in his arms and rocked him to sleep. Two friends announced their engagement, and we sang to them a song promising joy and gladness. We took the Metro home a little after H’s bedtime, assuring ourselves it was sometimes worth the breaking of routine, and listened bemusedly as a couple argued loudly most of the ride home.

Then, within the span of mere days, everything changed. And though the world is opening up again as I write this, I’m not sure it will ever be the same.

At first, we kept in touch frequently. Our small children became adept at videoconferencing, their tiny faces filling each other’s screens. But the relentlessness of the situation has worn us down, backed us into our individual corners. No one has the capacity to take on another’s burden, and so we’ve all gone silent, responding slowly and vaguely, if at all, to each other’s messages.

People sometimes make heroic effort to avoid us on the sidewalk. They wordlessly shepherd their children away from my son. More and more I think it might be years before our synagogue can open again. And I don’t dare speculate on how the realms of restaurants and office work and childcare will shift, though I feel they must.

I’ve ridden the Metro just once since that night, to a doctor’s appointment for H. I could tell he didn’t remember it. And even I felt a little like I was navigating a foreign subway system, slightly disoriented as the train rumbled through closed stations, unable to absentmindedly keep track of our location by its familiar, rhythmic lurching.

Last updated May 21, 2020