I’m still wearing my mask.  I prefer the color black: it’s more mysterious.  But hospital blue or white will work just fine.  I have masks hanging from my rearview mirror, swinging and bouncing as I drive my gravel road to work, jostling beside strings of beads, beach feathers, a head lamp, and a “kindness matters” sign, reminding me not to be mean to telemarketers and front desk staff. 

Faces are starting to come out.  I haven’t seen many of our coworker’s faces for years.  I did a double take the other day, saying hello to him --  the kind and excellent phlebotomist who has saved me on countless busy days in the ER.  He was eyes and voice and hands and forehead, but now, there he is, a boyish looking man, with a nose sharper than I remembered, and a handsome, tired face.  Holy shit, I haven’t see your face in years!  I probably should have thought of something better to say.  Hi, or something, would have worked.

I’ve been walking around the hospital, gaping.  There are people who were hired beginning or mid pandemic whose faces I have never seen.  People I have worked alongside, calculating medication dosages, taking patients to CT, or taking report from the OR.  Waiting in line together at the cafeteria.  Saying hello with eyes and hands and otherworldly voices.  When I see them mask less for the first time, I am shocked.  The faces that I imagined for years, the blue blanks I filled in, the faces I conjured to match eyebrows and eye-smiles, are always entirely different. 

We are walking around trying not to stare at each other, reconciling the reality of cheeks and noses and lips and chins to years of imagination. 

They are opening the hospital this week, removing the human screeners at each entrance and replacing them with laminated signs.  Have you had any of the following symptoms in the last 14 days?  Cough, fever, sore throat, abdominal pain?  Passive screening, relying on the goodness of the masses to turn themselves around at the gates.  Family members will again be shadowing the halls, bumbling into supply elevators and rioting at the nurse’s station. 

The cafeteria opens this week to the community too.  They are shepherding us closer, removing 6-foot tape strips from between the chairs and allowing the breath of naked faces to circle and greet.   Maybe the dark and windowless prayer chapel will get some use again.  It’s a miracle in stained glass, knee pillows, and short pews: sandwiched between the employee health center, the service elevator, and the morgue. 

Dear God, can we please have our masks back? 

For years, I have been listening to complaints about masks from people who consider it an imposition to mask in the grocery store. 

It’s hard to breathe. I feel claustrophobic.

Sometimes, I would listen politely, lightly agreeing, saying something to shrink my way back to solitude. Yep...sure is an adjustment. 

In these divided years, masking became charged, a political and social rallying cry, a flag to fly, or not fly. On our faces.  Where do you stand on freedom?  Some flags are of fabric or paper, others of skin or prayer.  

I self-righteously positioned myself in the masking column.  Yes, I am doing my part for grandma and aunty and neighbor with no spleen and coworker undergoing chemo.  Yes, I would rather cover my face than put someone else at risk.  Yes, I am on the correct side.  Self-righteous, yes.  I was not willing to consider other sides.  As a nurse, swathed in plastic, begging my patients to spend just a little more time on their stomach to increase the volume of air in their lungs, tucking pillows under shins and titrating oxygen, how could I have been open to both sides of the debate?

What about seatbelts, should we take those away? I would say to my like-minded friends. 

At least half of the truth is this:  I love to wear masks because they hide my face. 

I love masks, veils, face chains, and heavy winter scarves.  I’m all for max coverage of jowls and of the way fine wrinkles are giving my lips a permanently sad expression.  I am losing the tug-of-war with time, slowly, subtly, but the mask takes care of that. 

It erases double chins and covers blackheads and chapped lips and food in my teeth.  Eating in a mask! What heaven! Sliding M & M’s under the fabric and chomping gleefully, then turning to speak to a colleague or patient.  They don’t know it looks like I just ate a haunted doll house. 

I stopped wearing makeup during Covid, there was no point, especially for the 12 hour shifts in the ER.   You’ve never seen ugly until you’ve seen Covid ugly, the nursing memes said.  Of course, cute blond baby nurses with perfect hair and perfect scrubs could somehow pull off the “I’m still sexy under my space suit vibe”, but most of us looked ghoulish.  

We stumbled from Covid rooms, wild and flushed, doffing at first correctly, meticulously. Remove shoe covers.  Remove gown and gloves together. Perform hand hygiene. Remove eye protection. As the pandemic trudged on and became life, the gowns and gloves and face shields came off a little more rapidly.  Ah, that first breath after the N95 mask is removed, last in the sequence. Ah, sweet stale air. Ah, elixir of water.

 The bridges of our noses and tops of our cheeks were painted for battle with deep red grooves.  Often, we stretched snips of duoderm over our edges.

Wear that thick tight mask for 12 hours.  Under a face shield.  With glasses on. Try to keep him alive. With no way to wipe away the sweat or give the kindness of a smile.  This is what I wanted to tell the ones who cannot bear to wear a thin piece of cloth for 25 minutes.  But I didn't.  We learned early on in this pandemic, this culture war, this greatest of great divides, that it is no use trying to convince anyone of anything. Polarized, we hurtled on, looking for the light, choosing each his own candle.

Our hair was a frenzy once the cap is removed, and sweat washed our chins and our chests. When you told me Covid isn’t real, or that it's basically like the flu, I didn’t mention the patients I personally tended that week that aren’t breathing anymore (many of whom also believed that), who were finally intubated and shipped away to a bigger ICU.

We offer only the proof of our experience.  We tell you we were there; we saw it; we lost many of our own fighting it.  We prayed last breaths across uncrackable windows, on floors high above the innocent streets.  Now, Covid has shifted its mutation, it no longer attacks the lungs in the same way.  Now we say things to each other like Omicron and mRNA as easily as we say dinner or springtime.  The world is moving on, quickly, desperately - tearing down statues, voting, removing masks, eager to be done with the chaos. The virus, invisible as our wounds, lurks still, yet on we charge, ripping our masks off like a tight bra, all of us trying to breathe.

After two and half years of not having to wear makeup, or brush my teeth before work, or be vigilant about the arrangement of my facial features, or remember to chew gum, I am not ready to take the mask off.  So I don’t. 

I must look like the militant masker.  Mask in the post office?  Yes please.  Not to protect mama and papa during their daily trip outside the house, clutching more junk mail than letters, but for me.  Mask in the hospital?  Yes please.  Not for the patients, but for me.  To hide my fatigue, to hide the fragile lines of these mindfuck years.  I’ll be the last hold-out.  I’ll wear it because it is insulating. Comforting.  My breath is warm, constant, something to rely on, something inextricable with life.  Behind the veil – the world cannot touch me, judge me, know me, reach me, teach me.  I am a country of one, armored in surgical blue, tired and hopeful.

You’re still wearing a mask?  Yes, I am.  Then I always tell on myself.  I don’t like my face.  I should like my face, I know, because photos and mirrors and the fact that men still like me offers proof that I have a very good face.  But I am no longer 170 pounds.  I am 250.  And most days, I can’t see past the double chin.  With a mask on, though, I feel alluring, I feel beautiful, as if the most sacred of sirens could be lurking within.

I have black lacy masks and during the height of the pandemic, I got my eyelashes done every three weeks.  I have green ocean eyes that reach from one side of the earth’s crust to the other.  We communicated with only a glance.  Locking eyes.  I could be anyone.  You could be anyone.  We were exotic, wild, our truest selves, lusting and lingering over lemons and wine at the liquor store.  Blink and we broke the spell, the could have beens and never bes disappearing with our chins deep into our masks. 

Now, it’s all out there.  Our brazen faces, flying flags of naked hope.  It’s too easy to look away.  Too easy not to wonder what lies beneath.

Janna Wagner is a nurse and writes from her dry cabin in Homer, Alaska.  She is a first year MFA student at PLU’s Rainier Writing Workshop.