Charlotte Kupsh
Hope enters my Zoom conference room sometime after 10:30 at night: red curls and a smile that breaks across a serious face. I’ve been alone in my apartment for four days, I’ve had a glass of wine and three (four?) Negronis, and rules have ceased to be relevant, so I’ve invited a man from an app on a digital first date. Hope is the way he sees I’m drunk but takes me seriously anyway, asking about my parents, how I’m doing, whether I want to take a walk tomorrow.
A friend brings me lemon-infused simple syrup, fresh mint from her garden, and a purple, fragrant plant. “I’ve been buying plants to cope,” she says. We never meant to end up here, on this wide open plain where wind and weather and viruses rip across in what feels like only minutes. The syrup and the mint are to make gin cocktails. The plant is for me.
Hope is driving out to 48th street and parking behind Mo Java, a coffeeshop that will close by this time next week. Red hair spirals out the front of a knit cap. A Columbia jacket, a soft, calm voice that talks and asks and prompts for three hours while we walk circles around the dilapidated houses north of Nebraska Wesleyan. Hope is the cautious space we hold between our bodies.
Text messages from loved ones beam through the sunny windows of my studio: “Tell me something happy about today.” “I’m worried about you.” “Call me!” A friend shows up at my door with groceries: eggs, almond milk, sweet potatoes.
Hope is morning coffee in front of my laptop, red curls exploding across the screen. There are Halloween lights strung up in his background. He has a Cafe du Monde mug and I have Cafe du Monde coffee. I show him my map of Lincoln’s recreational trails, the ones I’ve run on colored in. He answers work emails, his face serious, twisting a mechanical pencil between his fingers. I draw anxious, angry characters and label them: “Day 8 of social distancing.”
At times, especially at night, hope’s knees begin to buckle. “Can you talk? I need someone.” “I think I have a fever.” My mattress is wearing out from the way I roll across it over and over. “I feel alone.” We all cling tightly to its arms; we hoist hope up.
Hope is setting up our camp chairs in the grass outside my apartment building, measured six feet apart by tape measure. We wrap up in fleece blankets and drink beer, the LED camping lamp my dad made me take “for emergencies” illuminating a red beard. It’s harder to hear his soft voice from this distance; I make myself quieter, stiller. We talk about breweries, bar hopping, and other things we might do one day, maybe. We listen to the birds and point out the bats, their rapidly flapping wings making jittery, uncertain trails across the sky.
Charlotte Kupsh is a teacher, writer, and doctoral student. Originally from the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, she now lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her work has appeared in Writing on the Edge, The Madison Review, Pleiades Book Review, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @CharlotteKupsh.