Sheltering in Place
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This is not my first time at the shut-in rodeo. I saw my agoraphobic
mother struggle, suffer during my early 1970s adolescence, preparing
me well for the day when not leaving the house would be as easy,
natural as breathing. Without a word, she provided step-by-step
instructions for allowing fear to control every motion, each reaction
to nameless threats existing outside. Excuses falling from her glossy
lips like kisses. She thought she was protecting us from any number
of unimaginable catastrophes, safeguarding us as much as herself,
while my father and his scarred traveling salesman sample case fed
her mania as paychecks, groceries, rent money failed to materialize.
Well-suited for being unable to decide whether or not to get out of bed,
to eat, to bathe, to move, agoraphobia was a welcome guest in my own
home in the 1980s. While standing by helplessly as friends were dying
from another ruthless virus, I was being courted, no seduced, by two
desirable men. One within driving distance, the other almost five hundred
miles away and as close as memory. When it came time to choose,
a decision that should have been as simple as blinking, the air left
my lungs along with the will to function as I previously had. Indecision
was in fashion, deciding not to decide, letting the wind transport me from
room to room, from radiance to gloom, from hunger to fragmentation.
In the temperate October days of 1995, following my grandmother’s death,
less than six months after my father died, I would leave the house on Ashland
Avenue and walk around the corner to Clark Street to catch the #22 bus to my
office job on Belle Plaine Avenue, less than three miles away. All it took was
one overcrowded rush hour bus to send me scurrying home, where I surrendered
to the safety of my bed and darkened room, waited for the world to end or for
Rick to come home from school, whichever came first. Patient as a teacher,
persuasive as a lover, Rick coaxed me through re-entry, guiding me with his
strong gravitational pull. Clearing a path for me, to make the softest landing,
to secure my footing, to walk outdoors into daylight, into insight.
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Gregg Shapiro
Gregg Shapiro is the author of eight books including the poetry chapbook Fear of Muses (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2022). Recent/forthcoming lit-mag publications include The Penn Review, Book of Matches, Sangam Literary Magazine, Exquisite Pandemic, RFD, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Poetic Medicine, Impossible Archetype, Red Fern Review, The Pine Cone Review, and POETiCA REViEW. An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.
