a moment in the day: half

Writing group night. We're meeting on Zoom again. We met on Zoom starting all the way back in March of 2020 and through until the last of us was fully vaccinated this past June. Then it was a lovely two months of meeting in person, sitting together, talking, hugging, laughing. But now Delta is surging, young kids still cannot be vaccinated, and there's new understanding that even those fully vaxxed can spread it. So I and my friends are back to growing our proverbial victory gardens: masking, zooming. Doing what we can.

As our Zoom squares start to fill up my laptop screen, mine looks wrong. Stretched out like when you try to watch a movie with the wrong aspect radio on your TV. The stretching pulls everything thin like my face and the wall behind me are vertical lines with tiny lines of space in between.

"Do I look weird to you guys?"

They say I don't. But on my screen I'm stretched thin, and I find I have to shift all the way to the right side of my computer in order to see my whole head and shoulders centered in my square.

"Gigi," Doug says, "you're half out of the frame."

I'm stretched so thin that half of what they can see I can't see and half of what I can see... Oh, I don't even know, but I shift back over to where the tiny dot of camera at the top middle of my laptop can catch me full on. Now everyone can see all of me but I can only see half of me, one eye, one shoulder, half a head.

As my friends catch up on the week, I peck around Zoom trying to figure out how to fix it. If I'm stretched so wide am I also stretched some top to bottom? Like, if I see my head are they just seeing my neck or something? I hunker down a bit. I click over to Google and try to look up the problem.

"Gigi," Doug says, "now I can only see the top of your head."

I abandon Google, straighten up. What I look like on here isn't for me. It's for my friends to see me and for me to be engaged with them. So I relax into my half self and join the conversation. 

Are we being stretched thin by covid restrictions? Are we feeling like we live half lives? And in a way: why not? What are we willing to sacrifice? In order to come out of this whole thing someday not only with our health and the health of our loved ones, but knowing that we did our best, our actual best to be the ones who didn't spread this virus around?