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I have a fantasy that life will acquire something it was previously lacking. The fantasy has elements of a dream, but as a post-pandemic reentry fantasy it feels more like a symptom, repressed in order to stay grounded in the timeless quality of the pandemic’s uncertainty. The fantasy presents itself like a collage, fragmented bits and pieces appearing from nowhere, like my queer bungled actions, slips, malapropisms, puzzling my interlocuter. The pieces just don’t fit, like the slip that came from nowhere.
I am walking with my mask on, I want to smile at a child playing, and then remember that my mask prevents me from revealing myself. A thought suddenly enters, “will we ever exchange innocent smiles in public again?”
I keep on walking and see couples sitting, yes, ever so romantically, inside an outdoor enclosed and heated space adjacent to a restaurant resembling a windowed porta-potty. My laugh is unseen. I fantasize that New York City will retain some of this silly make-shift pandemic culture and caravanesque architecture. “Social” distancing paradoxically encourages us to use space to identify overlapping avenues of our fantasies. Furtively kissing on dates through surgical masks while simultaneously shedding a layer of another metaphorical mask in order to make a connection. The pandemic imposes a novel lack that was not there previously, the lack of visual and expressive cues, a lack in the Other that we had not previously contended with. Like a carceral esthetic, old lack exchanged for new, but what is more, a fundamental fantasy traversed.