People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?

APRIL

As the novel coronavirus forced  humanity into six-foot, six-person, hermetically sealed, socially distanced bubbles, I kissed and kissed the cheerful cheeks of my baby nephew as we sat in a park, the sun a yellow coin above us. After weeks of seeing nothing else that breathed except on grocery runs, weeks of never touching another living being, I let the baby stick chunks of watermelon covered with drool in my mouth.

We began wearing masks, hiding smiles. But a baby reminded me what a smile felt like—giggling in my ear, waving at everyone he passed, making a funny face while he ate his first apple, wiping chocolate pudding all over his clothes. Human touch vanished into memory, except when the baby used my body as a jungle gym. His pull on my arm, his whole weight on my legs as he climbed over me while I read to him.

Outside, a neighbourhood isolated from itself. Inside, the baby held on to my calf with one hand and reached up with his other, until I left behind my teacup in favour of carrying his warm body close to mine.

MAY

The day that George Floyd was murdered, less than two miles away I helped the baby learn to walk, his fat short fingers wrapped around mine as he waddled bow-legged in circles around the kitchen island, a tiny barefoot cowboy. A man lay dying under the knee of a cop, his breath spooling out onto asphalt. Meanwhile I was blowing cool air over hot rice for a baby who loves Indian food.

Another Black man, immobile. In my lap, a squirming child.

By the time we rolled the stroller onto the sidewalk the next morning, graffiti was scrawled across billboards and construction fences: RIP George Floyd, the O in Floyd struck through with a peace symbol. ACAB. 1312. The news reported riots and looters. Online, rumours were already circulating that the fire at an AutoZone had been set by a white supremacist agitator.

After the baby’s bedtime, after curfew, we watched protestors march down the block, six feet between everyone, passing around hand sanitizer and masks. Rest in power George. I can’t breathe. Am I next? No justice, no peace. Justice for George. Black Lives Matter. Say their names.

Enough.

Enough.

Enough.

There were more than enough National Guardsmen, big silent men who sat, faces uncovered, next to signs requesting customers wear masks to protect employees and one another from catching a disease.

We stored our DEFUND MPD signs in the baby’s stroller and gave him every kiss we could. He’ll grow up learning democracy is an action. He is already growing up acting democracy, although for now he can only ride in the stroller while we march.

AUGUST

Returning to wildfire territory generated symptoms eerily similar to coronavirus. My head ached. My throat ached. My eyes ached. My anxiety ached. What scared me more? A fire burning me to ash, or a fever burning through my bones?

After a few days, a respite: settled close up at the foot of the Colorado Rockies, I watched the temperature tick down—thirty degrees, forty, fifty, this Labour Day setting records for the earliest freeze in decades. My suitcase was full of shorts and flipflops; I stood by the window wrapped in a red cable-knit blanket and watched snow accumulate in wet white lumps on the trees outside. The borrowed yellow socks I wore puddled around my ankles and folded under my toes.

A sudden pause in the low hum of the electronics. The grey natural light through the snowfall, while we dug for candles.

There wasn’t even the baby to keep me warm. He’d been reduced to a few inches on a phone screen, smearing food in his hair, practicing his walking, pausing every few minutes to grin up at the camera.

The power returned, then artificial heating, then, two days later, summer returned and evaporated the last of the snowmelt, and my flipflops touched the earth once more.

SEPTEMBER

The sky redder than fire trucks, our eyes burning, we drove through Oregon, through Washington. Reckless hours ticked by—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—but stopping meant watching the glow of fire on the edge of the horizon, wondering how close it would come. A drive that should take three days was done in one and a half as we sped past the worst of September wildfires.

We woke headachy, thirsty, our hands cracking. Ash gathering in the storm drains made it easier to explain away the symptoms that might otherwise have seemed like coronavirus. The quick-dwindling supply of alcohol-based hand sanitizer burned in our noses and in the splits in our dry hands.

The highway felt like how I imagine the apocalypse: just a few filthy cars traveling at speed, stopping only when we had to. The splatter of moth after moth after moth after moth hitting the windshield lent a horror-movie air to the quiet. Bandanas covering faces made every stranger into a threat.

But sometimes we’d get a phone call and in the background was the screech of a baby learning to talk.

NOVEMBER

For five days, anxiety drew my attention span into a glass thread. Red, blue, red, blue flashed across maps on a television that I couldn’t watch and couldn’t turn away from. Quarantined in my house on the north side of the Canadian border, my safety felt meaningless. My body would survive this. Could my brain?

For five days, they dressed the baby in blue, pasted BIDEN HARRIS stickers on his chest.

For five days, we held our breath, waiting to see if all of our efforts would bring that baby a safer future.

And then: relief felt like floating on a giant inflated pineapple on a green lake; like Four Seasons Total Landscaping; like the shrieking giggles of a child being swung weightless into the air, hands reaching up to snatch him from the sky, to pull him safe and close and squirming.

APRIL, AGAIN

Minneapolis is so eerily still on the verdict day for George Floyd’s murderer. There are prayer circles outside of the courthouse and National Guardsmen parked in their armoured vehicles nearby. We hold our collective breath for hours, waiting for the announcement. The baby is oblivious, and we chase him back and forth in front of the television, unwilling to let him leave the room in case we miss anything following him to the kitchen.

The exhale, when it comes, is more like a sob. Derek Chauvin is guilty on all charges and tension winds from our shoulders. We clutch the baby close even though he wriggles. We paper the window with protest signs and art: ASIANS FOR BLACK LIVES and YELLOW PERIL SUPPORTS BLACK POWER.

That night, we invite over only our other Brown friends and each sit six feet from the firepit. For a few hours at least, we let ourselves stop thinking about race.

What’s it like, people have asked me, how’s it been? Are you scared?

Yes.

But listen, I still have to do laundry. I still have to go grocery shopping. Despite the fact that many of us are experiencing the worst things that we have ever had to experience, one on top of another, and that I have been at ground zero for many of these worst things, there is a terrible mundanity to each day.

But then there isn’t: there is laundry, but sometimes it is full of tiny t-shirts and baby socks. Among the grey days there can be a spot of yellow, a little wooden puzzle piece of it pressed into the palm of my hand, and the baby has learned to say it, too: yuh-yooOOohw.