Every new year, I pick a theme for the kind of books I want to read that year. I guess I’m a perpetual English major, I can’t help myself. Often life throws me for a loop and this theme soon feels bitterly ironic – like the time I picked “love” and then was broken up with the very next day. But as the years unfold, I see the themes change shape and stay relevant in different ways – the shoulder I cried on during that particular breakup was attached to someone I’m still dating now. So I keep picking themes and have learned to be patient with them, and see where they take me.

This year I picked “community.” And again, when the virus hit, this felt ironic. Brutal. I don’t need to explain why, we’re all feeling it. What does community even mean when you’re afraid to talk to your own neighbor? What does partnership mean when you’re separated by multiple time zones and can’t travel? What is family when you can’t see your own children, siblings, or parents, when weddings and graduations and funerals happen that you can’t attend? When all your meals are eaten alone, when you sleep every night alone, spend your days looking at the same four walls around you alone, alone, alone?

How about when your children and grandparents are being sacrificed on the cold altar of what has never been more obviously meaningless, “the economy”? Or when you overcome the very real fear of death to gather as a community to speak out against injustice, only to be called a felon and arrested, beaten, tear gassed?

We’re seven months into my “community” year and I’m still struggling to find answers to these questions. Honestly, it’s really getting to me. Every single day now I reach a breaking point and either fly into a rage that scares my pets or I just break down and cry. Or both. I think today’s shaping up to be a crying day. But I think I know one thing: community matters more now than ever. We’ve got to get this shit together, people. It’s not just a fluffy, abstract concept, and it’s not just another zoom call. It’s literally life or death. What are you doing today, right now, to build community? What kind of community do you want tomorrow? A year from now? Ten, twenty, fifty years? Who are we really, and what can we be?

Because we’re not going to be in this chrysalis forever. We either rot in here or we come out, changed. And so far, if I’m honest, it’s looking a lot like rot.