For My Unvaccinated Family Member

I’ve thought about vaccinating you in your sleep. About flying across the country to break into your house and flooding your body with mRNA and teaching it to fight and protect itself and stand up against this stupid, homicidal virus. Even if you hate me for it. Even if it’s wrong to do that type of thing. But I won’t. 

Instead I’ll write. I’ll write all the things I wish I could say, that our family Facebook thread can no longer bear, after a year and a half of us brandishing articles like swords, and all-caps billboards of threatening Scripture, and the occasional whiplash of swerving from a vitriolic debate to a cute picture of someone’s baby in the next line to a conspiracy theory in the next. Text-to-text will never be the same as eye-to-eye.

So here I am, writing this. I wish I could see you, in person, not through a screen, and we could sit tucked into the corner of a sectional, or on the floor of our parents’ oversized closets like when we were kids. We could giggle behind rows of clothes, while listening to Eminem and Britney, and try to harmonize with the choruses. 

But we’re grown-ups now, facing very real, grown-up decisions. And you don’t want to get vaccinated. And none of the data points in the world will change your mind, and neither will any of the tears that I’ve already shed at the prospect of losing you to this new variant that they say is even more lethal than the last.

When I think about all of this, I feel my love for you contorting into anger, a clay figurine that’s been prodded and smashed, forming itself to whatever the conversation needed and sometimes hurling itself against a wall — please get vaccinated. Please just get vaccinated. Please protect yourself. Please protect your kids. Our aunts and uncles. Please — and now the clay sculpture is a hardened pit at the bottom of my stomach. I am trying to will it to turn into something else, anything else.

I don’t know, maybe it’s a seed. Maybe it’ll turn into a bird of paradise plant or a sprawling monstera. 

Nope, still a pit.

I know your world has told you that the virus isn’t that bad. I know the death tolls are just meaningless scribbles on a news screen to you, that the vaccine sounds scarier to you than the virus, and that I am always that person who refuses to get off their soapbox, even when pushed. Sorry about that.

Then I feel that. Sorry that I have lectured you so many times before, about which jeans were cool, which Jonas Brother you were allowed to like, which college you should go to, and a million other lectures. I would trade them all for you to listen to this one. 

Please.

Get vaccinated.

Then I don’t have to break into your house, and we can listen to Britney albums in person, now as grown-ups, while we drink mimosas and chat about how our kids are growing up too fast and not fast enough all at once. 

Then our parents can mend whatever broke between them, because they’ll see that we made up, so why can’t they, and we can all be a family again like we used to — crowded around the same dining table, all breathing one another’s air, hearts beating the same blood they always have, and we can just… be. 

But this is just a blog post that you’ll never read, and hundreds of characters later, I still don’t have the right words.