How I'm Surviving the Pandemic (Averbach)

I think we can all agree that social distancing sucks. It you're lucky you're conducting meetings from your bedroom while two kids and a dog zoom across the bed. If you're less fortunate you're spending endless hours trying to reach the unemployment office or your health insurer. You're not going out to eat, not shopping for a new swimsuit and not using the tickets you bought to the season opener. Cut off from human contact, the TV and refrigerator have become your new best friends. Your jeans are getting tight and the bills are piling up. Life is depressing, right? Only if you don't keep a Second Life in reserve for just such an emergency.

I'm weathering this storm by simply checking out of real life and moving into a 3D computer-generated virtual world called Second Life. I've been an on again, off again resident of this world for eleven years and watched virtual reality develop into a place you could almost call home. In real life my roots are showing and I desperately need a haircut. In Second Life it's always a good hair day and I'm always ten years younger than my daughter. Many of my Second Life friends spend their second lives at the beach, but I prefer the small coastal village called Thistle where I can forget about face masks, and social distancing as I walk down beautiful winding streets alive with trees that rustle in the breeze and birds that flit between their branches. I spent this afternoon helping a neighbor install a dock on her virtual property and then chatted over a glass of virtual wine as the sun sank into the virtual ocean. I'll probably go dancing tonight at the Blarney Stone, a popular Irish pub that features excellent live music and tomorrow I'm attending a poetry workshop taught by an instructor from the University of London. In short, it's really nice inside my computer and I'm not coming out until real life is safe again.  

Patricia Averbach, a native Clevelander, is the former director of The Chautauqua Writers Center in Chautauqua, New York. Her second novel, Resurrecting Rain, was just released by Golden Antelope Press. It won a Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association and was a semi-finalist for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award under the title New Moon Rising.