See You Soon
06/18/20
By Mairead Case
It’s challenging to write a final piece for Quarantine Times, because this is not over and I’m not really sure what else to tell you but "I'm here." I want to write something that helps, finishes, or presents—that is usual—but I can’t. A year ago, I found a quarter-box of chandelier parts, and hung half of them from the blinds in my apartment. I can tell you how those rainbows stretch along the walls in the mornings. I can tell you how much I love my friends, and that at some point, these last few months, that turned into a fearlessness I probably haven’t felt outside of music and color since I was a kid.
The first few weeks of quarantine, which seemed like months, are pearly and gray inside my brain, just like the weather outside my windows was at the time. I am lucky that isolation wasn’t new to me, in fact I have muscle memory for it—I write and meditate, I teach in prison, in high school I was very sick for about a year, and once I badly broke my leg. I am lucky that I spent last summer on myself, by myself, meaning I healed in parts and gave myself the reserves to be unselfishly present now. And I am lucky that my mother was the first person I ever saw in PPE. She teaches me to hope and care, which means she teaches me to be patient too.
My mother also teaches me about plants, and chemistry. Do you know how steel is made? We take iron and deprive it of oxygen, which takes its color and also renders it weaponizable: ready for use in guns, fences, hospitals, and doors. Of course it’s always more complicated, but also it isn’t. Our country can’t breathe: knees on necks, fluid in lungs, earth without pigment. We need to breathe, and in mourning I keep coming back to this fact. You need to breathe. There is no other conversation to have.
Before this and since 2014, every two weeks I went in to the women’s jail to teach reading and writing. Every time I came out, I took a picture of the sky. “Jail at my back,” I said, in my brain and on social media. In part this was a regular reminder of the sheer luck that I can leave the jail, a statement I mean seriously. But because jail-time is also snagged and sludgy, as the photo collection grew, it reminded me of how much I have gone in and out over the years. Of the different people we’ve all been. Last year at this time, the after-class photos were pink and orange. I feel dizzy thinking about the stretches of dark photos that come after, in winter, and now ahead of us too, since I won’t be teaching there for at least another few months. In the art-only version of this time, the photos have barely any light for a full year.
In quarantine, jail was not at my back but all around me, because everything was, all at once. I taught eighth grade during quarantine, and advised masters theses, and editedQuarantine Times, and distance-managed bond court watch for Chicago Community Bond, and all of it happened in my apartment—on a screen no less, which means part of my brain didn’t believe any of it was real. I checked in with exes and neighbors, or I didn’t, and I questioned why I gaslight my own self about the work I’ve always done. I imagined what to do if D. got sick, or S., or T., or M. or J. or my parents. I read, I stretched, I baked and drew and I drank only a little. I dreamed hard about the movies. One day my car windows were smashed, and my money was stolen but not the Parkay-yellow Acid Mothers Temple cat that sits on the dashboard. We did not call the police. I want all this work, love, and time to mean I can keep my friends and family safe. I think I also supernova’d.
I am so grateful to Ed, and Nick, and Elise, and everyone else at Quarantine Times for providing hope, care, routine, and purpose during unprecedented crisis. You just did it. Thank you.
I am also grateful to the folks who said yes to being Thursday Features, and would like to update you on some of their projects:
Santiago X dropped some new masks and t-shirts (“We are the medicine”) at santiagox.com/shop.
Heather Gabel is selling abolition collages on Instagram and donating 100% of the money directly to QT + BIPOC artists: @heathergabel
Stevie Cisneros Hanley has new work, “Pregnant Humanoids Passing Through a Rip in Space Time,” up at NADA FAIR through June 21: thisisfair.org, room 6.
Sarah K. Joyce documented Feed the People distributing books and meals; visit them on Instagram at @feedthepeople2.
With Nate Marshall, José Olivarez is writing personalized poems in exchange for $20 or more donated to a bail fund of your choice; just email that receipt to poemsforthefree at gmail dot com.
At 5:40p on Friday, avery r. young (with Krista Franklin, Meagan McNeal, and Duane Powell) is performing in a Juneteenth quarantine concert, curated by YAW and presented by Experimental Sound Studio and Rebuild Foundation, with all donations benefiting the Tamir Rice Foundation: ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts.
Emily K. Eddy is presenting Onion City Film Festival virtually, free, and worldwide for two weekends in a row: onioncityfilmfest.org.
With Mathilda de Dios, Chelsea Ross released the Justice Archives, a living document that traces and connects histories of policing and incarcerating youth in Cook County and nationally. It also documents work toward community-centered alternatives: freewriteartsliteracy.org/2020/06/12/the-justice-archives.
I tithed my editorial stipend back to the community in direct Venmo, bail, and #queerveganpie delivery.
I am without words when I think about how much I love you all and how much I learn, have learned, will learn from your work: it’s just one big light, and it stays lit. I am out-of-body excited to travel down Morgan together again, as soon as we can. Thank you for being who you are, now and in the Community of the Future too. I love you.
Mairead Case is the Quarantine Times Thursday editor. Mairead is a writer, teacher, and editor in Denver and Chicago. She is also a long-time friend of Public Media Institute/Co-Prosperity Sphere and everyone who made it, and a super-hero.