The grey skies over Bogota these days remind me of home. The clouds blend into each other and crawl along a greyscale matte that covers the city. The grey forms a seal against the muted hillsides at the city’s edges and muffles what was once a busy metropolis. It is the kind of grey that would bring snow to Denver, snow that would alight on bare faces in tiny cold sparks, hardly noticeable, making one ask, “Is it snowing?” The kind of snow that builds in the quiet of the evening until the lawns and rooftops of Park Hill would be blanketed white, and the tires of the cars going down Colorado Boulevard would carry that styrofoam whir though streetlights, moving down south toward Cherry Creek and up into Englewood.
It will not snow in Bogota. But the grey skies complement grey citizens in grey masks, framed in the grey mosaic of apartment building windows. The people are rubbing their temples and looking out into the quiet streets, the bluewhite penumbra from their televisions flickering behind them.
We’re in day fifty now. The only color that seems to break the grey these days is a color that, here in the north of the city, we only hear about. In the south they are hanging red hand towels and red kerchiefs and old red t-shirts out of their windows. En esta casa se necesita alimentación, they are saying. “We need food in this house.” We do what we can for each other but, as isolated as we are, it is also easy to forget others. It is harder to empathize when we have our own clouds slowly enveloping us.
By all material measures I have it good. I have food and clothing. I have a terrace where I can exercise and breathe the city air that has become strangely fresh. I have unlimited access to dull television series and films I choose delicately, lest they evoke emotions that I am not equipped to deal with anymore.
As I was cooking last night, I listened to a podcast, as I have done every night for the last fifty. There was a story on about Iwate, Japan and the kaze no denwa, or “wind phone.” Iwate, just north of Fukushima, is one of the areas where the tsunami hit in 2011. It is very close to where I used to live and it is easy to imagine the countryside there, the coast and its people.
The podcast talked of a man whose brother died in the disaster. As a totem to reach out to his lost sibling, he put a phone booth in his yard. The phone line is not connected anywhere, yet the man picks up the receiver and talks to his brother as if he was there. This is how he copes with tragedy and how he grieves.
Others from the region who also lost their loved ones in the tsunami come to visit the phone booth. They spend their time calling lost husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, grandparents. They talk into the disconnected phone and tell those who have moved on that they are still fighting through their pain. Ganbate iru yo, they say. They tell them not to worry: Shinpai shinaide.
As I listened to the story I was overcome with tears. I bent over and had to prop myself up with both hands on the counter. I sobbed. I have not cried like that in years.
I don’t sleep well anymore. I haven’t climbed on my little climbing wall in days. I cannot make it through the forty-five minutes of meditation that I was doing before, nor can I focus while reading. My ability to write comes in erratic bursts.
The morning after listening to the podcast, I bought a ticket back to the US. Fortunately there are still humanitarian flights provided by the US embassy. The next one is ten days away, which will make my total more than sixty days in isolation.
I’m worried about the me that will arrive back to Colorado. It is not the same person I was before this started. Strange that in protecting ourselves from the physical ailments of the virus there is a greater threat of mental deterioration. I have grown sick despite having avoided the virus.
I’ve learned that one can endure crisis if he has community. I had three clandestine visitors come by briefly in the last fifty days. Those days were beacons of light among the grey. But we do not know how often we can see each other nor do we know when we will be allowed to move freely in the city again. And so I will go back to Colorado, where, for better or worse, things are opening. I will stay with my family and climb in the mountains with my friends. I will heal.
I do not want to try and connect when it is too late; I do not want to talk to those I love through a phone line that will never reach them.
