What can I say that will reach across time? What would shatter this computer screen a fraction of an inch? If I could just stick a finger through the machine, if I could press my eye to the crack, maybe I would feel it in the contact of skin to skin, eye to eye.

There’s so much space. More than I ever dreamed existed. Three times the population from 2014 living on top of each other, driving a mile an hour in this mouse hole of a city, vanished in the span of a weekend. All it took was one Earth-altering decree. Stay at home.

The road is so empty. I wish they’d shut the traffic lights out and let us roam free. Cut the animals loose. We’re the animals now, packed away in dens, shut behind windowpanes. Some of us prowl the vacant streets that seem so curious without their scores of people. We slink around, assessing any being who dares to cross our path as a potential threat, a predator, a pathogen. But then they pass, and the road is ours again. Ours alone. Us animals are all alone. The rules of the road mean nothing when no one is left to follow them. They’re empty. Empty because there is nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing to be said.

Waiting. There’s a lot of space in waiting. The silence is long and drawn out. Waiting for the screen to light up, for a message to reach across the distance that is beginning to feel less and less social despite what it’s called. Sometimes the space is comforting, warm even. Like a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows on a rainy day. But then the air conditioner kicks on and the artificial air clogs up my veins, tying knots in my nerves. There’s a massive lump at the back of my neck where the computer cables leading to my brain have short circuited. They’ve been strewn in a heavy heap of useless matter, good for nothing but weighing me down. It hurts, this life that pulls my head off my spine, sucks my brain out of my eyes until everything aches and burns.

The Wi-Fi is exhausted. It’s incapable of handling the strain of so many fingers on keys, eyes on screens, heads just waiting to be slammed into the wall.

It hurts everyday around the time I unplug. By then it’s too late undo the damage that is done. I can’t hold myself up. My shoulders slouch like a doll cut from its strings. I slump forward. My neck kills. Nothing can relieve the pressure.

It feels like air has been let into my brain. It’s lethal, I think—I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that on TV somewhere. The air expands until there is a pocket, a vacuum, a bubble shoving against my brain. It won’t pop. It throbs like a beating heart in my head, a little fist in my skull knocking on all the doors like someone will answer if it just pounds hard enough. It’s all that empty space eating away at my cranial region.

Can I untwist the wires until they’re back in their place? Can I knock my vertebrae back into line? Can I shove a wire down my back until I’m forced to sit up straight? Can a balloon fall from the sky, and can I tie it around my head until it holds the weight for me? Will it feel like I’m flying while my feet are on the ground?

I scream into the abyss separating my body from the world. But in the end, I’m still alone in this March that spirals out before me like an infinite, lonely tunnel. This March that bleeds into months and years. This March that offers space in return for my sanity.