Facetime in Quarantine. A poem, by Jacinta Daly

These days all I see is an image of you,
your face floating in and out of view
as you move forward or turn away,
your attention caught by something in
your peripheral vision,
something invisible to me.

Your words emerge from a distant place,
a heartbeat behind the movement of your lips.
I watch you break apart,
then slowly come together again
your smile frozen in an image
I hold close to my heart,
which contracts and expands with each pixilation.

Sometimes the fear rises up.
When this happens
I hold those images tight in my mind.
The half frozen, fragmented features
reminding me that you are there,
held in the liminal terrain of cyber space
and quarantine,
waiting, just as I wait,

for the time when we can truly
look at one another
hold one another and remember
Facetime in quarantine.