Underthecurrent

We’ve been in relative isolation in a studio for two months.

Normal life paused weeks before that.  Not in the sense that people panicked, but people started to stay away from each other, a very different thing in a place where it’s common to touch, and joke with, strangers.  We stopped dining in restaurants, avoided crowded spaces, particularly places tourists would be.

Then everyone was ordered to stay home.

Because we can’t really leave the apartment at will, everything happening in the outside world is especially surreal, a parallel universe that we read about every day but can’t venture out to see.  Inside our small radius, everything has gone quiet.

[Two years later]

I’ll remember how the border crossing took eight hours even though we arrived before dawn.  How we formed a sudden alliance with a cluster of Venezuelans about our age.  Only one really spoke English so we communicated through pieces and gestures and facial expressions.  They helped us find the right places to stand, we kept space for them in the chaos of the next line.  We watched people with no papers sit in another line, one that never seemed to move, and women holding tiny babies get ushered to the front.

At one point they shifted the line around and numbered all of us, stamping our forearms, and with simple math it was going to be at least eight more hours before we even got inside through the door, but then suddenly they pulled a handful of people who looked like us aside.

Our new friends watched our bags while we dubiously followed a man with no uniform to the front, wondering if we’d be asked for some kind of unofficial “fee”, wondering if we’d refuse to pay it on principle.  There was no fee, our passports were stamped.  And it felt unfair, what right did we have to go faster than any of these people, us just on a holiday, them trying to get to jobs and money and hope?  What did we know about inconvenience anyways?

When we got back to our friends to collect our things, safe and guarded, and when they understood that we got stamped and could go, they were happy for us.  These strangers we had stood with for hours smiled and waived us off, passing us our bags from our group pile, happy for someone else’s luck and advantages.

We took our things, and our guilt, suddenly pressing the notes we had left into the hand of one of the guys, he’d need it more than we would, leaving before he could refuse.

I think about it still, their humanity lined up next to my own.  All of the times I’d recently felt ungrateful or impatient.  Whether I would have been able to have vicarious happiness for strangers were I in the same situation.  What sort of person I would be if almost everything was taken away from me.