“Cute earrings,” the lab tech said to me after swabbing my left nares. He had already circled a Q-tip in my right — a nostril version of Ring-Around-the-Rosie. We were temporarily bound in time and space, on more intimate terms than most strangers.
Yet Covid testing had become so routine, so efficient, I wasn’t expecting a conversation topic that went deeper than the weather. His mention of my personal jewelry punctured a boundary.
“What?” I asked.
“Your earrings,” he smiled. “They’re cute. Were they a gift?”
I touched my earlobes to remember which ones I was wearing. They were gold hoops, each with a single faux pearl dangling down the middle. My mother had sent them to me last Christmas when few people were traveling because of the new omicron variant.
“Yes,” I said. “They were a gift.”
“Very nice,” he said.
I was waiting for him to say more. He didn’t. He just smiled.
So I got up and went back to work, realizing the Covid tech guy had been flirting with me. He had attempted a respectful test of his own, this one for availability rather than positivity.
Happily in a relationship, I was flattered. And grateful not to be on the open market, vulnerable to viruses and other unknowns.