David McElroy

There are only five people who work every day in the building where my office is located. There are four people in the office next door and I’m the only person who’s in our real estate office every business day. Of the five people who work in the building, I’m the only one who hasn’t tested positive for COVID-19 at some point.

Because of changes in how we all work, our broker and agents rarely come into the office these days. I run operations for the company, though, so someone has to manage daily business in the quiet office. That’s me.

Several of our agents have tested positive for COVID-19 over the last few months. At least one of the tenants whose rentals I manage has had it. Another customer who came into the office told us a few days later that she had it. If I expand the circle to friends and family of people I know well, there are quite a few more. Some just disappear — and keep it quiet — for a few weeks so as not to alarm others.

A close friend told me that five men in her father’s Sunday school class have died from it over the last year.

I’m not an alarmist. I never sit around and worry about what I can’t control. But I’m finally starting to feel some fear for my personal safety. And after a year, I wonder how much longer this can go on without serious damage to our mental health.

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There was nothing especially noteworthy about the dream. I was married and we had a couple of children. I’ve had variations of this dream for years. It always takes place at a home which I don’t actually know, although the house differs at times.

For almost seven years, it was always the same woman when I had such dreams, at least in the ones in which I recognized someone. At other times, I couldn’t say who she had been. But it was always either this particular woman or a generic unknown woman. Until last weekend.

For the first time in a long time, the wife in my dream was a woman I used to know pretty well. Marie was a tall and beautiful Czech woman who lives in Prague. She was still in grad school when I first met her online years ago. She was smart and we had similar values.

I still remember the first time she called me on the phone as she rode a train home from her university. I was attracted to her and she was attracted to me.

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People are going to hurt us. That’s one of the certainties of life.

People we trust will betray us. People we love will hurt us. When we are vulnerable, some people will harshly judge us, often misunderstanding what we’ve allowed them to see inside us.

Once you’ve been betrayed and hurt often enough, it’s easy to feel numb. It’s natural to feel distrustful and to want to shut others out. But one of the central realities of life is that we need other people. Whether we like it or not, we have to go on loving and trusting and being vulnerable.

For some of us, this is one of the central contradictions of life. We know what our experience has shown us, but we also know that the love and connection and trust which we so desperately need can’t be found without reaching out and hoping that everything will be different this time.

This has been the central struggle of my life — whether to trust and love in the ways that I need or to run away and hide as a misanthropic hermit.

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