Mask Me

I was out of breath at the top of the grocery store escalator, which was turned off, the guy at the door said, to encourage social distancing. In Canada, I learned at work, they call it physical distancing, a term that’s supposed to be more exact, less euphemistic—or maybe more, since it suggests that what we’re doing isn’t, in fact, social as well as physical. But what I was learning, there at the top of the escalator, is that beyond the loneliness and antsy baking and the way we can’t remember the days of the week, there are six feet between all of us, and the physical effects are real.