DAY 09/31:
Prompt: “In the unlikely event of an emergency”
Harlan Crichton
“I was in grad school around this time in 2020. COVID was in the news but it hadn’t begun to spread in a big way in the States yet. My spring break was extended by a week, and I thought that this whole thing would blow over in like a month. I remember thinking that I hope this doesn’t effect my thesis show. Everything shifted then. I’ve called pre-March 2020 “the before times,” but thinking about everything that has changed in the past two years this joke feels pretty real.
Yesterday I found myself driving to my hometown, where I had fled to two years ago. I took a road that I had been down perhaps 100 times since I was a kid. The wind was cold, but the dirt was thawing and I could see the grass.”