Jump by Van Halen plays as I leave. I don’t mean it plays in my head, like at the end of a John Hughes movie. It actually plays over the PA as I walk out.
I arrived here a little less than an hour prior, anxious and feral, having not been in a place so crowded with people in over a year. We were shuttled through the line not unlike cattle at a zippy pace, and despite the months spent longing to be in this position, I had to tamp down the urge to bolt. It was a dizzying claustrophobia that clawed in my belly. Out, I want out. It’s not safe to be in a place this crowded.
Strangely, it doesn’t feel too unlike waiting in line to get into a venue. Someone takes my “ticket”, I’m ushered into the next place. The same nervous excitement hums in my belly. It makes me ache for the times when my reward for standing in a mile long line would be an evening of loud music and not a sharp little poke.
A flurry of paperwork and a whirl of footsteps later, I’m seated in a cold, metal folding chair, within a ballroom far too opulent for its current use. Nervous chatter swirls throughout the room and strangers tell tall tales with their eyes (the only portion of them I can see).
“Tell me about your weakened immune system,”
The man priming my injection seems to be in his late thirties. Warm voice, kind handsome eyes.
“I, uh- I’m type one diabetic,” I stumble, feeling undomesticated and unfamiliar with conversation. It’s been a good long time since a stranger asked me something and I worry I’m becoming unsocialized.
He makes a mark on his sheet.
“Ah yeah well, most of our diabetic patients today have been doing very well. You all are accustomed to shots anyhow, right?”
“Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” is playing on the overhead, the fiber optic lights hanging from the ballroom ceiling dance in concert with the music. I imagine moonwalking out of here.
“I ah, yup.”
Pinch. Poke.
“Good to go.”
“You’re a pro,” I smile, shrugging back into my flannel.
He says nothing.
There is nothing to say.
It’s finished.
And like that, I’m vaxxed. At least, half vaxxed.
I sit, waiting for my fifteen minute observation period to be up. We, the newly vaccinated, are as an orchard of nascent antibody-builders, each of us spaced precisely six feet apart from one another. The rows upon rows of us are surreal to behold, all prim and parallel and ordered, in stark contrast to the chaos the previous twelve months have been.
Left to idle, my mind drifts to music halls, concerts, theatres, places where standing room only used to be the rule. Places where we’d leave at the end of the night covered in sweat that didn’t even belong us. Places where strangers would crowd in on one another to delight in mutual adoration of some silly little compositions of pitches and phrases that started the same dopamine drip in our brains. Places where electricity crackled through rooms, and excitable human energy thrummed in the very architecture.
Would it ever be like that again?
Or will we be six foot separated cherry orchard people for the rest of our days?
Will we be sat in little metal folding chairs six feet apart from one another at South By Southwest? Would we all be bubble boys and girls?
My fifteen minutes end, and I stand to exit the ballroom, ensuring I’ve got all my belongings.
And “Jump” plays over the PA.
A man in his forties across from me smiles. I can see it, in the way his eyes crinkle, and his mask is pulled taut against his face. I imagine he is remembering being covered in sweat and pressed against a thousand strangers who are friends for one night, stretched up on his toes to catch a glimpse of Eddie Van Halen.
And I imagine he assumes some day, on down the road, we will return to that. So for now, so do I.