Wrap Your Writing Around You (Covid Era)

Take refuge. For now.

Imagine your writing as a shawl, a cape, a beat-up hoodie. Enter this image and explore. Move through the layers. What time is it? Where are you? Who scrawled “Meow” across a window? Was it you? Were you alone?

We have been told to isolate. Some of us fight the act. Others luxuriate. Some know that it is in isolation that they create. Others are terrified to be alone. I once was.

I was thirty-seven years old the first time I was alone. I was, no surprise, in therapy, My brilliant therapist challenged me to go into one of the upstairs rooms in the therapy center for two hours. Alone. No pen. No paper. No – it was 1977 – phone.

It took me months to get up my courage to enter a safe and silent room.

I walked up the stairs to the room as though I was headed to the gallows. I opened the door and walked into a little room with one window. There was a couch. There was me.

I sat on the couch and began. I remember moments so ragged and eerie that I could have been on LSD. I occupied an ocean bottom, an ice age, a black hole. I forgot who I was. Words formed and broke apart. I persisted. I persisted sitting in a comfortable room in a safe therapy center on an ordinary Rochester, NY street. In the company of my mind – and my past

Now, there is no such condition as isolation. I am, of course, in my own company – and yours.