Spring arrives on Monday. This will be our first real spring, for quite a while.
March 2020 is the beginning of offenses, remember. We must flatten the curve of the progression of the coronavirus. Doctor Arruda slaps his fingers, to show us how. Everything is closed for 14 days, they say. The longest 14 days in history.
March 2021, we are still in it. The third wave is raging. Quebec is divided into color zones, like a hospital. Green zone, yellow zone, orange zone, red zone. We have become good at telecommuting, we no longer forget to turn our microphone back on when we want to talk. The government opens things and then closes them. Fortunately, the vaccination begins.
March 2022, still in, but half out. The sixth wave is raging. Nevermind. We are starting to get used to it. So much so that we can go to karaoke. But everyone sings with their noses, because you have to stay masked.
March 2023. Here we are. Spring arrives on Monday. And we will be able to welcome him with his face revealed. We will even be able to take him in our arms and kiss him. There are no longer two meters to respect. No more vaccination passport. No more curfew. No more limited number of people to receive at home. Everything is back to how it was before. Everything except us.
The end of confinement and sanitary measures was done with so much caution and apprehension that it is to wonder if we have carried it out, if we have assimilated it.
One thing is certain, as much as the implementation of the bans was brutal and painful, their lifting did not cause euphoria to match the vanished evil.
In the spring of 2021, when we can barely leave the house, an Extra gum ad makes us dream. It begins with a sentence: Sometime in the not too distant future. Somewhere in the not too distant future. A man wakes up to the sound of the radio. The host announces: “We are back! We can see people again! The man looks outside, his eyes incredulous. He takes an eraser. Celine Dion’s song sounds: it’s all coming back to me now. A woman receives lots of text messages: we can meet now! People disappear from Zoom and leave their house. Everyone runs in the streets. The woman takes a piece of chewing gum and kisses a stranger. Everyone starts kissing. And Céline keeps singing. The Extra slogan is displayed: we could all use a FRESH start.
wow! How we were looking forward to that moment. To this great mass movement. To this overflow of joy and affection.
It didn’t happen that way.
For containment, everything cut square. For the deconfinement, everything did not connect square. It happened slowly. One mask dropped at a time. A fingertip handshake. It took us a long time to regain our spontaneity of yesteryear. So much so that one wonders if we have really found it.
The consequences on our deep self of all these cloistered months, we will need more hindsight to evaluate them. But we can already see that the world is getting old. And that’s quite normal. You don’t come out of such prolonged isolation fresh as a rose.
To regain our lightness, to give ourselves a youthful look, it will take more than chewing gum. There are stages to go through.
The first is mourning. More than 18,000 Quebecers died during the pandemic. It’s 9/11 six times. Have we sufficiently honored their memory? Last Saturday, the flags of Quebec were at half mast to mark these lost lives. Did you know ?
I know, we’re sick of hearing about COVID-19. We would be less. It was the only headline for two years. Yet people are still dying from it; yet people still suffer from it.
One day, we will have to face it. To mourn, first. Salute the deceased. With greatness. Highlight the courage of the unlucky who are still battling the virus. Ventilate our locked up loneliness, our personal dramas.
Then, celebrate all those to whom we owe to be still alive. The healthcare workers, the scientists, the essential workers, the people around us who helped keep our spirits up, kept us from sinking. It seems to me that we showed them our gratitude, especially in the first few weeks. In the end, they were taken for granted. As usual.
In March 2020, at the height of our fears, if someone had promised us that we would still be here, in March 2023, and that the worst would be behind us, we would have smiled with happiness.
In this first spring without a mask, it’s time to offer each other, this smile of recognition.
That smile of rebirth.