Love in the time of SARS-CoV-2. What’s the word for waking up into a dream? She can’t think when she first wakes up. It’s all impressions from head to toe. The first breath. I’m alive. The second breath. He’s alive. He’s an impression right on her chest where her heart is. Cogito, ergo sum. Cogito, ergo sum. She can’t think, but she is. She’s a stiff bundle of mechanosensory nerves warming up to the sliver of light slipping through the blinds.

Love in the pre-apocalypse. He’s asleep next to her or pretending to sleep next to her. Ninth breath. There he is on her chest, on her heart, and she wishes she could stay there. Tenth breath. She can think again and hates that there are no answers. There are only questions that beget more questions. What’s the word for wanting it all to be a dream? The eleventh breath. The eleventh breath. What’s the next thought? She needs to sweat out her fear. 

She closes her eyes. The twelfth breath. Can you see the moon? She can see the moon. It hung in the sky like dread, like a blank mask about to be pulled off. There’s a question there. What is the question? Thirteenth breath. What was behind the mask? This is a memory, but buried in the memory is a riddle. She had her earbuds in and “Foreign Spies” was playing at full volume. She was looking up and this is the crux. This is the part to remember. This is what needs to be solved. She saw the moon the way one sees the past and there was a message wanting to be seen, but there at the cusp of the revelation came a shock of movement at the farthest edges of her vision and she turned and the movement became a man, growing arms and legs and pushing through the dark. He walked past her and turned to her and became all eyes. Two enormous eyes that gleamed in the dark and twisted the light into presentiments of death. 

She ran. What else could she do? She ran. She ran and forgot the moon and understood this is why she liked to run. No fucker could ever catch me. The fifteenth breath. She couldn’t be caught, but the violence of his eyes lingered in her skin like a parasite.The sixteenth breath. Exertion is a cleansing ritual. She opens her eyes. Will is a renewing flame. Every day she becomes herself again by her own choice. She can hear her lover’s breath. She can think again. Love in the time of the pre-apocalypse. She reaches over and touches his chest. The seventeenth breath. We’re alive.

She’s reminded by the light looming through the blinds that their survival is a two-person job. They’re in an architecture of their own design. A doomsday bunker only they can see. Cogitamus, ergo sumus. The eighteenth breath. What’s the next thought? She closes her eyes. She sees the moon again. There’s the riddle. The moon is the past and she can feel the contours of the answer. The nineteenth breath. 

He wakes up from a dream.