It started with a mask.

May 18, 2020

A month or so back, at the beginning of mask wearing out here in Bloomington, Ind., I was taking a walk and a friend pulled up in her little Toyota pickup truck. We chatted a bit from a distance (we usually hug, so many friends, so many beloveds we no longer touch, that touching being one of the ways we know each other, a sensorium bereft, and let us figure out how to mourn this properly), and then she told me she was on her way to drop off some masks she’d made for her nephew, who’s about my age, at the jail.

“Here’s an extra,” she said, holding a mask out the window, where it dangled from her finger. It was pretty, kind of floral and quilt-y, and homemade as hell. I reached toward the mask, toward my friend, trying to keep away from her at the same time — both of us a little bit nervous, a little bit scared (I’ve never before noticed that “scared” and “sacred” are so close), making that by-now-familiar I-hope-we-are-not-infecting-each-other face.

That gesture, and the thousands of such gestures these past several weeks I have been a partner in the dance of, the clumsy and beautiful and awkward and elegant and nervous and tender figuring-out-how-to-reach-toward-while-staying-away dance, the reaching toward despite, the million gestures that carry all the figuring it out, all the wondering how to be close without touching, which is also to say, how to be together in our sorrow, how to be together in our need, our need for one another, which is profound, and good, for each other’s touch, really, how to hold one another, in these forms and labors of care, some of which we’ve always kind of done, some of which are emergent, we are inventing, they are becoming, to me anyway, differently luminous these days, these days of need, forms and modes of care utterly quotidian and utterly novel (though care is never quotidian), forms and modes minuscule and grand (though care is never minuscule), forms and modes and acts and events of care that become practices of care, and structures of care, witnessing this, studying this, trying to join this, the light that radiates from the dreaming and need and labor, I mean, despite the sorrow, in the midst of the sorrow, with the sorrow, brings me to what is there always if sometimes I forget, and I do, and when it takes me in I often nearly weep, I feel something breaking a little bit inside, and I think this is joy.

Ross Gay is the author of the poetry collection “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” His collection of essays, “The Book of Delights,” was published in 2019, and his book-length poem, “Be Holding,” will be published in September.

Doodles by Andrew Sondern. Andrew is an art director at The Times.