By Lisbeth Coiman
All I have to offer you today are my solitary confinement meditations.
Let’s weave the collective thread of our sorrows in a cloak to protect us from all evil.
Unless you are a widowed-mother of four in a war torn country, stop calling out privilege.
Let’s inundate the web with poetry and art. No need to advance bad news. Devastation will hit us in the face when we come out of our dens.
Give generously and accept with humility.
Share wisdom, not resentment.
I rather go with a broken than with a frozen heart.
Love yourself as if you are loving the entire humanity.
With the blinds open, gift your neighbors the joy in your face. It may be the last time they amuse themselves.
Allow solitude to transform you into a wondrous human.
Resourcefulness equals acceptance equals survival.
Think of what will carry you through this transformation but no longer be useful at the end of the crisis. It’ll be the metaphor of what you shed in this journey.
Accept the prayers offered to you. It might be all they have to give, and it might as well be your last meal.
If you might die of a suffocating disease, why are you strangling yourself? Practice breathing.
You don’t know if tomorrow you’ll be hooked to a ventilator, morphine dripping into your transition, unable to whisper, “te amo.” Call those who need to hear it now.
When deep in the trenches, even the toughest soldiers cry.
Lisbeth Coiman is an emerging, bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches and dances salsa.