Kaia Simon

You home? my sister texts me, and then immediately follows with 😂😩.

😂😩 because of course I’m home and she knows it. We have nowhere else to be.

You betcha! I reply, tongue in Midwest cheek.

One second later, my Google Hangouts app chimes. I click to join. My brother and my sister appear, each in their own box, be-headphoned and smiling at me from their living rooms. I am so happy to see them.

My sister lives in New Rochelle, NY, the site of one of the first COVID-19 outbreaks in the U.S. My brother lives in Minneapolis, the last of the three of us to be officially ordered to #StayAtHome.

I try to remember to stare at the green light next to my webcam when I’m talking to my brother and sister, because that looks like I’m making eye contact with them. And all I want right now is contact.

These daily conversations through our webcams help me focus within the radius of what’s most important. We affirm that we are all still symptom-free and feeling good, even if cooped up. While I stare at the webcam light and smile desperately, in my peripheral vision I see my three-year old niece’s quarantine fashion choices of the day. My seven-year-old nephew runs into view and asks me to give him a math problem to solve. “Tía Kaia, I like to add hundreds. So you can give me two numbers that go up to nine hundred and ninety-nine!” He writes the numbers on a folded up piece of paper, and dashes off-camera to solve them. My brother tells us about what it’s like to be the IT guy while his coworkers try to set up video conferences with clients from their own homes. And all the while I focus on the green webcam light, beaming my love through it, willing it to shine through the laptop screens on the other side, hoping they feel it.

I learned this trick—to make eye contact through the camera instead of by looking at their eyes on the screen—when I was applying for professor jobs a couple of years ago and many search committees did first round interviews over Skype. It felt unnatural then, and it still does now. Now, though, this isn’t about projecting a scholarly, put-together self who’d make a great colleague. This is about trying to keep myself steady amid the churn all around me. This is about using a webcam to do with my eyes what my arms cannot: gather my family up close to me, then step back, hold them at arm’s length, and squeeze their shoulders to confirm that they, that we, are okay. Until I can do this in person, I will focus on the green light that connects us. I am so grateful to be able to see them these days.

Kaia Simon is a writer and professor in the English Department at UW-Eau Claire.