Borders.
In the early days of the pandemic, there were calls for barring flights to the U.S. from China. My sister was in Poland when Donald Trump suddenly announced an impending ban on incoming flights from Europe. She hastily scrambled to adjust her itinerary and was home in Massachusetts within a week.
It didn't take long for us to understand that travel bans be damned, the horse that was CoViD19 had long since left the barn and locking the barn doors now was a pointless exercise in willful blindness. It soon dawned on much of humanity that regardless for our relative comfort or antagonism toward the idea, we were somehow finally going to be forced to accept the degree to which the human race is itself a single organism. We are all interconnected. Gangrene in any corner must not be ignored.
This is an idea that had long had traction in a figurative sense. Now we were coming to see it in all its dimension.
I remember seeing the first footage from Italy, of empty streets, shuttered storefronts. No trash in sight to blow by in the wind. Silence. Italians were ordered for a time to stay home or face the full force of the legal jeopardy upon them.
We went into something called "partial lockdown."
I never felt a prisoner in my home but there was a period of a few weeks during which time I worried about food scarcity. Though I had yet to see evidence of it, my friend August van der Becq who had herself survived 9/11 by the skin of her teeth, reminded me more than once that should public health officials ever declare Manhattan to be in a state of contagious medical emergency, I would have exactly 45 minutes to escape the island before the blockades went up. I never was able to fact check this. But its effect stays with me nonetheless.
Then I found somehow, imperceptibly, I'd transitioned into a kind of new abnormal in which the border between me and the outside world and all other human beings took the form of a new friend called Zoom.
For the past 16 months or so, if you and I wanted to connect, we did it via Zoom.
Friends have remarked that after months of life lived inside the home, all the walls of your home have acquired and now carry with them new associations which reinforce their outsized significance in our lives.
Just on the other side of that wall, it occurs to me (now more than ever) there either are or aren't neighbors, people whose lives I must have barely pondered when the real world urgently beckoned on a fairly regular schedule.
The theme to last year's competition was: 'Me & My Masks.' And while a flood of entries flew in so steadily in part because our irrational politicization of N95 and KN95 masks--to wear or not to wear--was on the forefront of our minds as well as on the tip of our tongues.
Now as the masks come off, each of us, it seems, is forced to confront her own border. The line between then and now, here and there, you and me.
If me and my masks were related they were two sides of a coin or many faces of one being. That was 2020. When a virus spread like wildfire and led us all to water and made us think.
Now, having gained the sort of insight one can only acquire through quiet meditation, we confront a strangely unfamiliar, stressful yet obviously ubiquitous terrain. It's everything that suggests to us that "this too shall pass."
And I hope your characters and their border crossings find their way into Hear Me Out 2021.
God speed. (ABSOLUTE-NO-EXCEPTIONS-FINAL-DEADLINE IS JULY 22 AT NOON, EDT)
