TIME is ON MY SIDE By Lavinia Plonka
W
hat’s today? It’s been six weeks since I shut my studio doors due to the pandemic. At least I think it’s been six weeks. Without an appointment book full of clients and classes, the days have blended into a temporal soup of drifting. I search my mind for familiar touchstones to guide me. Hmmm. Nothing comes up. What did I wear yesterday? Right. Sweat and a t-shirt. Is it Sunday? No. Wait. What was yesterday? My mind desperately sorts. Was yesterday the day I binge polished the chrome fixtures in the bathroom? No, that was two days ago . . . I think. Yesterday I rearranged all the cords from my computer, printer, modem, phone, lights that were a tangle under my desk for the last ten years. Now, where was I? Right. What day is it? I have entered the zone an unemployed friend once dubbed the no-day week. No more anticipation of a Sunday hike. I can hike every day, and Sunday feels like . . . wait? Is today Sunday? 10
thesofiamagazine.com | June 2020
You’re reading this in June, but I wrote it in May to meet the publication deadline. For all I know, there will be no magazine in June. Or by some miracle, I’ll be back to work. Or the entire world will have entered some Matrix like virtual reality and all of us will be sitting in our rooms lost in simulated environments and eating Soylent. There may be Mad Max type bandits roaring up and down NC 20 trying to break into people’s homes to get their toilet paper. Or we may find ourselves standing at the ends of our driveways, at least 6 feet apart, singing “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” together as we raise our faces to the startlingly blue sky and breathe in gratitude for having been passed over by the angel of death. Or . . . while I can’t predict the future, I can marvel on a revelation that occurred since our confinement began. For at least 20 years, I have used the fact that I work every day as a reason to say I don’t have time. I don’t have time to write the
