Medford, MA – April 2020

At the end of 2019 I moved back to the US after living in Jordan for four years (and after I quit my job working in Zaatari Camp). I moved in with my sister and other housemates in Medford, MA.

About two months later, the pandemic upended everything, and Raja and I, newly married, got stuck on opposite sides of the planet. Two weeks after our wedding in Boston, he’d traveled back to Amman just before Jordan shut down all commercial flights due to COVID-19.

I’ll never forget the exact date and time that the Amman airport closed: March 16, 2020 at midnight. I wrote this essay in the early days of that separation, when we’d only been separated for two weeks.

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This morning I woke up at the crack of dawn, though there was hardly any daylight because it was raining so hard. My stomach hurt. I went down to my car in the rain.

I drove through mostly empty streets, past a deserted Tufts campus, listening to Brandi Carlile on Spotify, looking out through the streaks, the rivers, the rivulets of rain on the windshield at my old college. So many memories there. It’s shut down now due to COVID.

I’m living with my sister and her fiancé, so far away from my brand new husband, who is suffering so much in Jordan because of his mother’s disease, his father’s pain, his brother’s absence, and his country being under one of the world’s strictest lockdowns.^[1]

Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

– Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones

I wonder what I would have thought, in 2014, if while walking across campus with Meghan, heading from the library to the campus center with our backpacks on and to-go coffees in hand, you’d paused the universe and told me, just for that moment, that this (here, now) would be my situation on an early morning in April 2020 in Medford, Mass.

Married, Boston, COVID, unemployed, driving to Market Basket in the rain to stand outside the grocery store, keeping six feet apart from the other people in line, to buy a month’s worth of groceries.

Then the frame would unfreeze and I would keep walking with Meghan, none the wiser.

I’m so happy I married Raja a few weeks ago. I am so happy to be living back in Boston. I am not even that stressed about being unemployed. I am drowning already from the long distance and it hasn’t even been that long, I’m bothered by my housemates most of the time, and I’m feeling so bad for Raja in his current situation. He’s moved back in with his parents temporarily to help his dad take care of his sick mom in the midst of the lockdown. I feel helpless to support from far away.

I am anxious, not in the way I was at the height of my burnout from working in Zaatari, thank God, but in the way it seems every single person on earth is today, upon waking up.

Another day, another shocking 24-hour news cycle. They say New York City might hit its peak number of cases late next week. They say the NYC hospitals are only days away from running out of ventilators and critical supplies. They say Cuomo is invincible, a Trump-whisperer, even.^[2] They say governors are fighting to be taken seriously on these White House calls. They say Dr. Fauci needs a security detail because he’s receiving death threats. They say New York is building mobile morgues because funeral homes are getting overwhelmed? They say unemployment is up to 13%. They say everyone might be ordered to wear masks soon when out in public – or even force everyone in the US to shelter in place. Can they do that? Is it possible?

^{Something was always happening with Rudy Giuliani.}

In Market Basket, some people were wearing masks, some were not, and I saw one guy with a bright orange handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth. It was actually less crowded than usual, because they limited the number of people allowed in the store, but people were stressed. Shelves were half full, a mess of scattered cans and boxes.

The manager was keeping up a constant stream of instructions and PSAs and encouragement over the intercom in his heavy Boston accent.

“This is a community effort, we all have to do our paht and chip in to combat this thing. We have a dwindling number of staff over the past few weeks. We’ve reduced our awahs, closed our lahttery station, suspended our returns policy, and stopped allowing any reusable bags in. Please leave them at home or in the cah. Please join the checkout line which stahts from the back near the produce section…”

The uncertainty is the most certain thing now. What we can rely on for sure is not knowing when this will be over, or even slightly abated, and when things will be back to normal. Not knowing how long the recession or depression will last and what will happen to our jobs and families and especially grandparents.

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[1] I think this NPR article summed it up well: “The country of Jordan has implemented one of the strictest lockdowns in the world to stop the spread of the coronavirus, forcing most people to stay indoors and temporarily shutting down even grocery stores and pharmacies. The Middle Eastern country with its 10 million residents has so far arrested more than 1,600 people for breaking the five-day-old curfew, which bans even going for walks or allowing pets outdoors…Last week, the country started placing arriving travelers, including Jordanians, in mandatory 14-day quarantine. About 5,000 people have been quarantined in hotels in the capital of Amman and the Dead Sea. Shortly after, it stopped all incoming and outgoing commercial flights.”

[2] That did not age well.