Coronaland
Where do we begin. Where do I begin. The space of I. Our body as an outline as a border. Hand as an edge, fingers where a person ends. Hand holding hand: an act of friendship of care of intimacy. In a basement of bookshelves we meet. Two of our surfaces touch, palm pressed to shoulder blade and rib. Separately, we fold into the unfolded chair. Metal through cloth, hard flat into the soft. Knees touch, thighs near. The space between two bodies holds heat (remember it now how you feel the heat how it holds how maybe you once flinched at the nearness, or felt aroused, or how maybe you wished for some s p a c e). Physicist Carlo Rovelli: “I think our own experience of the world — our thinking, our being, our emotions — are so much produced by our brain, our body, which are full of heat, [laughs] a deeply thermodynamical thing, so we cannot get out from this presence of heat when we think about our experience.” So casual, so nothing, sitting next to a stranger. This human proximity a fact of living in a city. // Now we are fractured. A space between where I begin and you begin. Our body as an outline as a border. The blue nitrile gloves that covered our hands that were the edges shed, disembodied discarded on the street. Our home a country, the door the walls, the windows a border. Every day I listen to a voice recording of a friend reading a poem and they sound far, alone, in a dark room. I watch silent films of India during the 1900s, before independence, made by British travelers visiting the colony, and then I listen to the sound recordings from my trip, just a few months back, one from a morning in Mumbai, a morning in Jaipur, a morning in Kolkata. Sound from space. Over shaky video I talk to a friend in the UK I met on that trip to India. She says seeing you and talking to you reminds me that our trip was real. I send her a book with my plane ticket, from Kolkata to Mumbai. Evidence that our time was real.
We are aware now of the great and narrow spaces between us. When we emerge from this great pause, how will we begin?
Shuchi Saraswat is the director of the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith and a nonfiction editor at AGNI. She currently lives in Boston, where she's working on a book about windows.
