“Hold fast to dreams 

 For if dreams die 

Life is a broken- winged bird  

That cannot fly.” 

• Langston Hughes 

Paint me an endless grey vacuum. Feelings are tucked away, lest they give way to the floodgates of sorrow that color everything you have seen, every sensory memory of being knee deep in the ravages of Covid-19 for months and months.  

It is easier to just hum along in an endless metronome. Get up, shower, offer up praise that you live to see another day. Go to work and throw yourself into tasks. You count yourself among the lucky that you have a job to physically report to unlike the millions at home trapped in the endless proverbial month of August where the grass grows unkempt and the days meander into each other. 

“One foot in front of the other. It is selfish to feel so raw when others have lost so much.” You trim back the exuberant layers of your personality in case you slip up and violate the invisible force field around your friends. Hugs, a sympathetic hand touch are among the things of the past. You bump covered elbows and keep moving. 

The tears come sneakily and unbidden.  The crystalline September mornings without the rumblings of yellow school buses. The vacant signs on your favorite hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. You wonder what will happen to the hopeful fresh-faced talented actors and dancers that descend on New York City every autumn like lemmings, hoping to make their mark on Broadway or the NYC ballet. You survived raw pain and death this spring, but it is the absence of dreams that is slowly doing you in. 

Yet, on the surface, you keep it together. You scan your coworkers’ faces for the same cracks in the foundation that you feel. You joke about “pandemic potbellies” and soldier on because everyone is in the same boat. You cry when no one is looking because you miss dreams. It is everything intangible that you have lost. 

G, you were the tipping point, the phoenix that spewed fire on me that made me feel alive again. 

It was 230 am and I was making my way home after a night call when you spotted me, flung me into a masked bear hug (pandemic be damned!) and excitedly told me about your nursing school plans and your young family. Talking with you made me feel like my old self. 

I remember nagging you and encouraging you to go back to school. It is said everything happens for a reason because hearing that you were following your dreams lifted my pervasive sorrow. 

Thank you for making me believe in dreams again, for making me believe that we will rise again. 

Just look outside the window and you will see that birds are still flying. 

Elizabeth Bishop writes in her well-known poem, “One Art” 

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”.  

We’ve become virtuosos on the art of losing. “One foot in front of the other” 

That simple exchange taught me it is ok to hope, to dream, to mourn all that we have lost and most importantly to try rebuild, have excitement and expectancy again because to quote yet another poet, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” 

We will fly again.