The Isolation Journals - Day 1

Have you heard about The Isolation Journals?  It's a 30 day creativity project organized by writer Suleika Jaouad.  Each day, she will send participants a writing prompt meant to spur at least 10-15 minutes of journaling.  It's a way to connect, a reason to get out of bed (unless you have one of those Jerry Seinfeld astronaut pens), a way to process what you're feeling.

Here is my Day 1.  I confess, I was a little too Star Student and jumped right into the assignment.  I checked my email after I finished and discovered I had responded to the wrong prompt that was sent out by mistake.  Fight me.

The prompt I followed was to write a letter to the first person who comes to mind of someone I know.  The real prompt was to write a letter to a stranger, but if I had done that I would have probably written to the creepy guy who "just wanted to show [us] something" on our walk the other day.  This one is more meaningful:

Dear Andy,

It feels strange to write you a letter because you are sitting mere feet away from me, and haven't strayed beyond a 20 foot radius from me, for more than an hour at a stretch, in weeks.  We've been at this quarantine thing for almost three weeks now, which I had to check on a calendar because my sense of time has flattened and stretched like a wad of Silly Putty picking up the inverse of the Sunday comics.  

I have been thinking a lot about funny little childhood rituals that we suddenly all have time for again.  I didn't tell you this, but the other day when I was refilling the bathroom soap dispenser, the Method bag burped out a soap bubble and I watched it float, encouraged its journey, waved it through air currents, for untold minutes.  What a glorious waste of time.

Do you remember (I'll be shocked if you do) when we were first dating and we exchanged actual honest to god LETTERS through inter-office mail, sometimes tucked inside books we were sharing?  Even then, in 2008, the idea of putting pen to paper was charming and antiquated.

Your birthday is on Saturday, and I hate that you have to spend it in captivity, like one of Joe Exotic's poor tigers, pacing your cage.  Have you considered the irony that a show that brought us all together as a nation, expanding our collective notion of how wonderfully yet caustically absurd this big world can be, ends with its protagonist in his own cage?  We're all of us beautiful beasts locked in cages.