More than a hug is on the table now. We’ve deserted the park for your apartment on Valencia. You are standing by the couch, head forward because you lead with your nose, posture deteriorating this early in the quarantine because you refuse to have a desk in your apartment, stubbornly approving citizenship on your couch, leaning way too far over files full of people’s best versions of themselves, though a desk is the only furniture I’d have if I had to choose. I’d sleep under it like a dog. I’d eat on it, I’d bow to it like a television. I’m a masochist and a workaholic, but you can’t tell yet. You don’t hate me for it yet.

The mask on your face dances with tiny pink butcher knives. I’m obsessed with those soft pastel blades and I look the mask up later online and buy it and never tell you, even when my girlfriend buys it too, after seeing it on my face. If another plague comes, which it will, if this one lasts and lasts, which it will, my girlfriend and I, united sometime far from now in New Jersey or the East Bay, will hold hands with matching knives slicing across our muzzles, and will we think of you? Will my heart rip a little, thinking of you? Will my girlfriend even know enough details to begin? What will I dare tell her? Is this the kind of weird shit you mean when you say you don’t want to date someone in a relationship?

The year before the plague, I lived in Krakow, the most polluted city in Europe. Whenever my air purifier glowed red or purple, I wore a mask down Starowiślna and across the park that used to be the city walls, my dziękujęs muffled behind reinforced cloth. Passing the shops whose pluralization made any item cute: lampy, tablety, chipsy, komputery. I longed for America, where I’d never wear a mask again. My last act in Poland was trashing a gallon bag of N95s in the Warsaw airport. Now I smell my breath all day against my face, on endless walks, afraid to touch my phone and contaminate it, but caving for updates from the ICU, where the onset of twilight makes the virus worse, because the immune system accelerates at night, my friend says, or her doctor, her chest compacted with sediment, her oxygen dialed high: It’s almost five. The hour my lungs fail. Sometimes I forget to worry about her and my whole body goes rigid as if I’ve cursed her and I light another candle, a Catholic habit borrowed from my girlfriend. I hold the tapered green wax as the flame swallows oxygen.

You say, “I wish I could invite you to stay and relax.” This is a normal thing to say. But what you do not know is that I never relax. I walk sixteen miles a day. I write a hundred more stories than I can sell. I water a flowerbox of lettuces that I never feel like I deserve to harvest. It’s never time to finish and enjoy, even a tiny bitter red leaf. I have hemorrhoids and acid reflux and pits in my feet eaten by bacteria. But it’s kind of nice, kind of quaint, that you ask, even if it shows how little you know me, and I like it. I’ve used your bathroom. That’s why we’re here. You haven’t condemned me to the facilities on Church with girls giggling so close behind me in line that the virus dampens the back of my neck, and I’m grateful. But now I’m in your living room that’s also your bedroom and you’re telling me I can’t stay. And the mask on my face presses my breath against my teeth and the mask with the knives covers your face in a way that’s fetching, not that I don’t like your face, but it intensifies your smoky eyes when they’re all I have to read.