With luck, I’ll be travelling to see my best friend at the end of September. They live in Minneapolis, which is a bit far to drive even with a couple days off. We haven’t seen each other going on years now, for a combination of distance and the nigh apocalypse. So it wasn’t that much of surprise that, when I bought the plane tickets, my card was declined because the bank thought it had been stolen.
I related this to the help line at the airlines while trying to get the same flights confirmed, and was met with laughter.
“You need to get on a plane more,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, laughing along, “Been a bit hard to do lately.”
It really has been, hasn’t it? Those kinds of milestones and sort of patterns that have changed since the world turned upside down. It’s not like I haven’t travelled, mind you. There was a wonderful road trip I took through February encompassing the majority of my old stomping grounds, visiting old places and old friends. Travelling south, it was interesting to watch whole swathes of the country address the virus with shifting severity. Oh… Florida… Vermont remained a short drive away, with the added advantage of dealing with fewer people than elsewhere. It still took a little over a year and a half to hug my grandparents again, but we made it in the end. Portland became a frequent haunt, outdoor dining in the rain and cold as any good New Englander. Boston faded to a distant memory. Too many people, crowded public transportation, stricter rules and tighter enforcement than New Hampshire (not that we can really blame them for that.)
But I actually went to Boston last week, and it was still there. A city. A real city, with crowds (mostly without masks) and subways (which I rode for the sake of it, not even really going anywhere), and restaurants and bars. It was a little surreal, and a little humbling. The places that closed, the new ones opening, all the things that had changed. The places still not open (come on, Mondays at the MFA). It was my first time seeing Boston since at least January of 2020, and it was another crack in the seeming iron grip COVID had over most aspects of life. I really did miss it.
But those were all driving trips, even if one of them was a six-thousand-mile drive. Now I have plane tickets, and train tickets (seeing Hadestown with another friend in September (my first show on Broadway, imagine!)). My coworkers are talking about trips to Mexico, and Europe. The world that for so long seemed to be shrinking now seems to be growing again.
That in and of itself is a weird feeling. I know a lot of it comes from being in a wealthy country, for having access to vaccines, for having kept my job and therefore receiving income covering most of the expenses these trips require. These are things I can’t begin to be thankful for, and they represent more than one of the remaining barriers towards the dawn of a truly post-Covid world. There’s a kind of fundamental understanding that we’re not going back to what was normal (if it ever was), but instead forging ahead with the creation of a new normal.
Jury’s still out on what that looks like.
Both the plane and the train require masks.
I’ll still be carrying my vaccination card around, naturally. (Someone want to tell me why they didn’t make them small enough to fit in a wallet?)
With the rise in variants and the questionable influence that they’ll have on the vaccines we all have hopefully received, there’s always the chance that the plans will collapse in on themselves and we’ll return to something of the limbo of years’ past.
But I think it says something that more of us are willing to take those kinds of chances, and that those chances are even there to take. That the tide has turned this much.
I’m actually looking forward to something outside of the regular day to day.
Trips, and friends, and watching the world speed by from the windows of a train.
(I still don’t really like flying, but what can you do?)
It’s all forward motion.
A future.