Of Droplets and Darts

By Paul Sullivan

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

The darts slide into the cork target easy enough, most of them sinking into the wood within the second multicolored circle. While I’ve yet to strike a bull’s eye, I have been slowly been getting better, the darts landing in the center more and more often. As I walk up to retrieve my projectiles, I reflect that the dart board has probably gotten more use within the past week than it has during the entire five years that it’s sat on the wall of the game room.

When we first moved into our hose, the basement was an unfinished mess. However, at some point, one of the previous residents had installed an old, 1800s-era pool table, only to decide that moving it out was too much trouble. But the table spawned an idea in my father’s head; he would restore it to its former glory, then renovate the room and turn it into a sort of “man cave.” He was successful in this goal, but the game room goes unused by the family — even by him.

Years later, the game room now serves a different purpose. Since the entire state is now on lockdown and Kenyon is closed for the semester, I needed a comfortable place to study that was decently far away from my little brother. He and I love each other as siblings do, but we also fight as siblings do, and trying to have class next to each other would be an unpleasant experience for all involved. So I chose the game room. And in between pre-recorded lectures and study sessions, I play darts.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

I go up to the dartboard to retrieve the objects, but then I stop, and lean in for a closer look. I smile.

Bull’s Eye.

It’s a victory. A small one — but I’ll take what I can get.

I need all the victories I can get these days.

The day before Spring Break started, I was having dinner with my friends — people I’d known for years. People I’d come to know and love. Though the corona virus hung in our minds like a cloud on an otherwise sunny day, the main topic of conversation was the upcoming end of our senior year. We knew that soon, we’d be graduating, forced to find our own way in the world. And, though none of us ever explicitly said it, we all knew the real source of our anxiety; that in just a few short months we’d be scattered to the wind, each of us disappearing to our own separate corner of these United States, never again to meet in Pierce Hall. Never again to drink cheap beer in the basement of old Kenyon. Never again to shout at one another in horror as we drove off Rainbow Road in MarioKart.

But we still had a few months left before that happened. So we went our separate ways, thinking that in just a few short weeks, we’d see each other again.

How naïve.

The media started giving us instructions, telling to stand six feet apart from one another at all times, where we’ll hopefully be out of range of virus-filled droplets from an infected person’s cough. Telling us to wipe down our groceries after we receive them, because the virus can survive for three days on plastic after being deposited there by someone with the disease. But in the end even that might not be enough because under just the right circumstances, the virus can go airborne in the form of an aerosol, floating in the breeze, waiting to infect anyone it comes in contact with.

It doesn’t seem fair that you can do all the right things and still loose.

But occasionally, the talking heads give us reason for hope; the curve may be flattening, as more and more people stay home, limiting the diseases’s spread. The virus might not survive in the summer, when the heat and humidity will literally cause it to fall apart at the seams. But those brief bursts of optimism are always tempered by a but — “but we don’t know for sure.” We don’t know what we don’t know. We have no idea whether the curve really is flattening — whether or not the virus is vulnerable to heat. We don’t know when we’ll finally be able to leave our homes and see our friends again.

So in the meantime, I retrieve my darts to try my luck again.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!