I ignored all of the Delta headlines at first, simply because it seemed sacrilegious to harsh the indelible vibes of June and July. When it became clear that the numbers were not going to come down — when questions about vaccine efficacy breached into the national conversation — a familiar dark ambiguity washed over our apartment. Inscrutable questions of transmission, mutation and breakthrough infections hovered around every social appointment.

Our long-gestating Italy trip, originally scheduled for last spring, has returned to its yearlong holding pattern. We’ll be packing our vaccination cards in November when we travel to a Miami wedding that’s enforcing strict inoculation requirements. I think I speak for everyone when I say that I am so tired of not knowing if I’m doing the right thing.

By August, I was attempting to indulge in as much corporeality as possible before any shutdowns rolled back into place. I’m still going out, I’m still seeing my friends, and I continue to agonize over the moral responsibilities concerning a virus that seems to change in nature with each passing day. Perhaps that is the lasting imprint the pandemic will leave on our brain chemistry: this unshakable feeling that the simple pleasure of drinking inside a bar is too good to be true.