Empty Spaces
In this guest post, Edward brings us a short prose piece relating to the current social climate. Take a read, take care, and know that we’ll be together again soon. Thank you, Edward, for sharing these beautiful words.
Empty Spaces
by Edward Ahern
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We define ourselves by the spaces we fill, by our closeness, one to another, to another. The surging floods of faces and bodies reassure us that we’re a snugly fitting part of a larger whole. When our outsides are vacated and we’re boxed away or hidden behind masks, we can’t help but worry.
We’re pack animals with strong loves for group and territory. When both are withheld, we suffer from social vertigo. And worry, not just about today, but tomorrow as well. How will friendship and work companionship be deformed, or worse go missing? Can we return to touching shoulders with strangers in stadiums? Can we still find someone special when the social places, shuttered now, may be changed to dancing six feet apart?
The empty parking lots we drive by on our way to buy food and medicine mean gapingly empty parts of our lives. Can we begin to recover that?
We shouldn’t have to measure closeness with caution, but will for some time to come. And then eventually, as we create tolerance of a new disease, we’ll resume old ways. And the empty spaces will be filled by our needed sense of place, of closeness, one to another, to another.
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over two hundred fifty stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of six review editors.