6 feet apart, please

Still necessary
London, ON
August 2021
This photo originally shared on Instagram

The other day, I noticed the supermarket with the shiny orange floor had removed the circular stickers from the ends of the aisles that for much of the pandemic tried in vain to point shoppers in the right direction.

In their place were ghostly residue-flecked circles with a lot less shine, and shoppers who cared even less than they had previously about which direction they walked, or how far they remained from others.

Let's be honest with ourselves: no one followed those lines anyway. Well, I did. But most days it felt like a losing battle.

The funny thing about the timing of this change is that it comes just as vaccination rates stall and the Delta variant surges. You'd think we'd need more distance between us, not less.

So when I came across this worn-but-still-functional floor sign at another store, I hovered over it for a bit and pondered the sheer futility of public messaging throughout this historic event, and the inability of ordinary people to follow simple instructions designed to keep us from getting sick.

Whether or not a given stretch of floor has stickers, I'll continue to put as much distance between myself and strangers as I possibly can, because you just never know.

And if I've learned anything since March 2020, it's that you can't trust anyone but yourself to navigate global - or local - turbulence.

All I want is to fetch my stupid groceries so I can get home without catching something deadly along the way. That isn't too much to ask, is it?

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