Day 18 of #the100dayproject - The last day I wrote poems in a café

The last day I wrote poems in a café

The café was full of people dripping
from the rain outside. I sat at a long table
flanked by many different people
sipping their coffees and eating pastries.
I talked to the woman across from me,
asked her what she was writing on her laptop.
She wrote content for hospitals and the CDC
and she was writing about this new virus.
She was worried about it, but she nor I
knew that this would be the last time
we would sit down in a café to talk or
strike up a conversation with a stranger.
We didn’t know that it would be the last
time we would see other faces without a mask,
or exchange breath as if the air we breathed
wasn’t shared between everyone in the café,
as if our breath was ours and ours alone,
but just like the long table, our coughs, sneezes,
sighs, laughs; everything was communal, collective.