Back again

It's all the same.

The decorated paper leaves from last year are still full of
photos of our maskless faces.

You still pull the orange lever for
the emergency eyewash fountain in science.

The we the future posters still adorn the walls, though,
then we didn't know –
had no clue at all –
what our future would be.

The board in Spanish class is still dated to
Lunes, el 16 de marzo
(but the 17th was really
too surreal to be dated.)

The weekly calendar in ELA still says,
NO SCHOOL on
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday in
neat dry erase marker
(but if there'd been space, you really
could dry out that marker writing out
all the days we
weren't there.)

Somewhere, somehow, time realized we
couldn't keep up, so it stopped,
froze,
waited patiently, continuing with only the hope that
we'd be back someday.

While we sat at home
traveling through websites, not hallways,
opening Google documents, not binders,
walking to the kitchen, not the cafeteria,
we knew we'd return.
When? How? were the questions we
didn't know the answer to.

Now I'm starting to know how,
have been through how;
now time unfreezes
and it's like it was before.

But something's changed.

The desks in the cafeteria.
The hand sanitizer by the door.
The masks on our faces.

And
the six feet between us.
The separated groups.
The only-two-days.

And
the unnatural quiet as we eat our distanced lunch.
The awkward space between us as we stand in a circle on the grass.
The feeling of wanting-to-hug someone because you're
so glad to be back, but knowing that
you really, really can't.

But also
the gratefulness for people who smile through their masks.
The excitement of having people talk — muffled, but minus the choppy internet connection.
The way we've grown to value being face to face, no matter how much space between those faces.

So if quarantine-me asked me
to tell her the how of returning to school?

The school is the same.
But —
maybe in a bad way, but
likely for the good

we're all different.