Tale of the Times – by C

My First Quarantine Birthday

Written shortly before my second quarantine birthday

My first quarantine birthday was bad.
Or rather, it was a bad week
that happened to take place in lockdown
and have a birthday in it.

The lockdown, on the whole, was helpful.
The birthday… less so.

I’d had plans
That didn’t involve other people
(the best birthday plans never do
and we’d been shut down for nearly a year,
so what, anyway, was the point of hoping)
but that I couldn’t carry out the way I wanted.

I did complete them
painstakingly piecemeal over the next three days,
through exhausted tears and gritted teeth,
and was ultimately pleased, but

without those plans, and in the midst
of this helpfully unrelated isolation
I could have gotten what I most wanted:

For no one to find out
the last corner of my world had shattered
again.

especially
not
me.