The death toll in Europe and America is staggering. Trinidad’s death toll is miniscule, in comparison: 8 lives lost so far. I should consider myself happy and fortunate to be living in this island outpost.

But, nah, Dawg. Covid making me sick.

Not the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, but Covid in the umbrella sense – like how we say “Winter” to encompass all those long dreary days plus the suffering and endurance and collective inconvenience of the season.

Covid, this season, is making me sick to my heart.

Some say the virus came from animals, and why not? Hard to deny: it seems to be turning us into animals – some, of course, more equal than others.

Some say the virus preys on those with co-morbidities. Yes, it has surely revealed Trinidad to be a deeply diseased society.

Trinidad and Tobago are twin sisters, but Tobago is the quiet one. Trinidad, meanwhile, is a chick with a bad auto-immune disorder, who shows up at the club and starts wildin out. Her skin inflamed, her vision blurry, her body twitchy as white cells and black cells and 1% cells and all the other clusters of cells war against themselves, she insists she doh care one ass and she have rights and if she hadda go down, she goin down with a bang. Oh Trinidad. Keep calm and stay home. Please.

You have a right to party, but you have a responsibility to not kill yourself – or other people. Trinidad, hunny, it’s a combo. These glorious rights come with pesky responsibilities in the same box. Think centre breast with fries and a small Cokes – a supa deal.

Or maybe I am misdiagnosing. Maybe I shouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Covid has uncovered us at war, on a cellular level.  Maybe what ails Trinidad is less chronic, less serious than that. Maybe, sometime in the past, she was whole, but then came the fractures – small, but many, and often.  Maybe nothing broken was ever properly reset, and everything healed badly. And now, nothing lines up for us anymore. We have lost our symmetry, synchronicity and elegance of gait. Some of our children have so much forward momentum, are travelling at the speed of blue light across a digital screen – while some of our children are, right now, asking granny for a knife to sharpen a zoot of a pencil to draw on a wrinkled copybook page. Some of us are running – pell-mell – to the bow and its apparent height and safety, while despising the stern as it sinks, forgetting what we’ve all learned from Titanic and Jack and Rose: is one ship, Dawg, and at some point we will all drop in the sea.

Unless, there is order. And compassion.

Please, spread the safety blanket, be another patch in the quilt: stay home.