The Way the Light Shines Through the Cracks

By Heather Korbulic

The birds piss me off these days. Their incessant, merry chirping seems tone deaf to the darkness that fills day after blurry day in quarantine. Dear little finch – shut the hell up – I’m trying to be miserable here. I am trying to direct a state agency from my dining room table with an intermittent VPN connection. I am trying to homeschool my children. I am trying to make everyone three healthy meals a-day, fold all the laundry, keep the house clean, exercise, meditate, and keep up the spirits of everyone I love. Don’t you understand that your “cheep, cheep” just magnifies the distance between what was and what is? Quit rubbing it in. We get it. Your life hasn’t changed.

What once was – coffee with colleagues, laughing around the conference room table, dinner and drinks with friends, playdates, casual grocery shopping, and the gym… it’s all gone. An invisible virus has inserted worry into every breath I take. Will I get sick? Will my family get sick? Will my sister who is a nurse on the frontlines get sick? Will my elderly parents be ok? When will I see them again? Will my friends get sick? How will our community recover? What can I do to help my adopted home state survive the most devastating era we will ever experience?  Will we ever get back to what was? 

And yet somehow the poppies still bloom, the Truckee still flows, the sagebrush grows, and the sun still sets behind the Sierra Nevadas. The trains still whistle, my friends still call, and my children still laugh. Tahoe is still blue, the birds still chirp, and my heart still beats. 

The light shines through the cracks of the broken was illuminating what is.

Images/Heather Korbulic

Heather Korbulic is the Executive Director of the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange— the Nevada state agency that runs and operates the online Affordable Care Act marketplace known as Nevada Health Link. She lives with her husband, Quinn, and their two children, Noah and Hadley in Midtown Reno.