Text & Image

How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

This image, drawn by a four-year-old, says it all."I am angry!" next to a scowling face with gritted teeth. I don't know whether she drew it because she was feeling angry, or if she was just practicing drawing faces because they're learning about feelings at school. So I ask her how she's feeling. She tells me. It's elaborate, rambling, complex, and funny. She's honest, unselfconscious in a way that adults never are. She speaks in clauses and interrupts herself. She is love and joy and all good things distilled, sitting in the patch of sun on the scuffed living room floor of the new, smaller house we just moved into. She is surrounded by cardboard boxes and the dust of the house's previous occupants (why wouldn't you clean a house before you sold it to another family during a pandemic?! "I am angry!"). She is learning about feelings. She is teaching me.