It’s a ghost town outside.  The streets are empty and the stores are shuttered.  We are reminded – in this static quiet moment, when the hustling and bustling ends and there is nowhere to go – that we are all ghosts, and we always have been; spirits dressed in skin, having forgotten somewhere along the way, that we are not the bodies that we wear.  The flesh is vulnerable to virus and decay, but the ghost beneath is timeless and immune.  It cannot be touched, but it can be felt. It cannot be infected, but it is infectious. The spirit is more contagious than any plague or pathogen. It whispers, its still thin voice carried on the wind with the tumbleweed that tumbles down our abandoned streets: “Can you hear me, now that everything has stopped?  There is nothing to fear. Stay calm, stay home.  Embrace your loved ones, embrace the stranger, not with your hands or your arms, but with the ghost in you that is the same as the ghost in them.  When this ends, when the streets are boisterous again and the shops reopen, when the virus no longer threatens or forces you to slow, I will continue to whisper, many will continue to feel alone, you will choose to either return to the surface of things or dig beneath them,  and it will be a ghost town still.”