The Next Step

By Holly Day

I keep starting sentences with “When this is all over”
acknowledging that there will be a future when everything is normal again
when I don’t have to worry about touching or hugging my friends
when I can see my parents again, face to face
and not just as flickering images on my computer screen.

I keep finishing conversations with, “it’ll all get better. I know it will”
because I need to give assurance to the people around me that there’s a future
I need to say it out loud for myself, a grim mantra, a reason
to keep putting one foot in front of another, the pages of the calendar
are filled with notices of different symptoms I need to pay attention to
but I’m not in the hospital yet. I’m not dead.

I keep waking up and not knowing what day it is, they’re all blurring
one into the next, one after another, Monday slips into Friday
weekends don’t mean anything anymore. My daughter comments
on how weird it’ll be to go to school again, to be around other kids
tells me how much she misses her friends, all the plans deferred.
I tell her, “When this is all over,” and “It’ll all get better”
and how I’m looking forward to the day 
when poems like this don’t make sense anymore. 

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Cardinal Sins, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and The Muse Writers Center in Virginia.