Stay With Me

There is a quarantine currently in Argentina. It is pretty absurd to have such a lively city quarantined. But such is life and this is a serious crisis. It seems almost insulting to have to live here on quarantine. But I get it. I get it. People do not want to die. The government doesn’t want that to happen, either — they seem to be responding swiftly, albeit with a bit of a heavy-handedness. It’s fine.

I am fine. Things are fine. I am writing a lot. I am reading a lot of things. I am teaching a little bit. Things like this in the world make you really figure out where your priorities lie. Mine, right now, lie with trying to get back to the US — to be with my family — of course. But if I can’t do that at the moment, I will stay here. There is nothing else I can do. Yes, that’s right, because all commercial flights from Argentina have disappeared. Almost magically, overnight, or at some point the commercial airlines decided on having no more flights out of Argentina. Kind of crazy how that happens. But we’re not magical creatures. We cannot invent things that don’t yet exist. That means there are not yet ways to get people out of Argentina who want to get out, such as me.

There are provisional ways, such as calling the embassy and seeing if they are running charter flights (yes, they seem to have that idea, too, because I received an email from them about registering for a charter flight for US citizens abroad who want to come home). But until that actually comes to fruition, I guess I will be here.

It makes me a little wistful and sad to live here on quarantine, because I have such good memories here given my time in the past in Buenos Aires — the city where I live now. Thus, when I went outside it was a little sad to see the streets desolate. However, I know this place will rebound with life. Think about the life that was going on here just weeks prior to the eruption of the major crisis. Now that is something that makes me hopeful, not sad.

And so it is a message of hope that I wish to convey to the whole world, honestly. That we can overcome this. And it may shift our priorities. In fact, I hope it does shift our priorities towards having more compassion for others. If it doesn’t shift our priorities, I’ll be extremely disappointed.

All we have right now is each other. And that is enough to get through this. And thus, I didn’t expect this to happen, but neither did anyone else in the world. Unless you are able to predict the future, you had no idea either. So try to band together. Don’t separate from others, even as the government is telling people to stay isolated. Yes, stay isolated physically. But in the hardest of times, we must come together, not stay apart. I am talking figuratively. Do FaceTime, WhatsApp video — whatever it takes! Stay with me my friends!