Thoughts on the pandemic

For the first few weeks, I dreaded the dusk.

It reminded me of how I felt in the early postpartum days after the birth of my first child. It was one thing to be bleary eyed, bone tired, tearful during the days. There was a certain acceptance about that. Of course all new mothers are exhausted. But as night fell, uncertainty descended upon me - it wasn’t that I knew I would have to wake up intermittently, or at dawn, or that I would have whole three, four, five hour stretches in the black of night where no sleep would be possible at all. It was that as night fell, I didn’t know what it would hold. The not knowing was devastating, and scary. I missed my old life. I missed life. I didn’t know what came next.

And when the sun set in those mid-March days of 2020 I felt the same uncertain fear. The same longing for something that felt so precious, and so distant. Had I ever appreciated it, savored it enough while it lasted?

My sons were five and one when we went into lockdown. I got out a big butcher paper sticky note and wrote an hour by hour schedule for us - Ms. Mommy’s School. We’d have outside time, and exercise, and quiet time for reading, and then yes, of course they could watch some TV. I look back on the picture of that schedule and see how hard I was working to maintain the idea of a life that was slipping away.

Chris said - if the entire world could truly shut down for two weeks then it could go away. I had never had any reason to understand pandemics before then.

It was going to be a tough two weeks, I thought.

We watched a movie very early on - we’d watch a movie after the kids went to bed. See, maybe there was some joy to be found, even here.

In the movie the characters take MDMA and go to a rave. I asked Chris if we would ever go to a party again. He said yes, but I cried anyway.

I imagined the end of the two weeks, a block party to end all block parties. We did it, because we can do hard things. I’m embarrassed about how little I knew. I’m embarrassed about how little I thought I could handle.

We went outside and I sat in a lawn chair as my kids ran around the backyard. It was too cold to be in a summer dress but I needed to remind myself I still had legs, a body, a face that could be warmed. I thought about every ex boyfriend I had ever had. Every boy I had ever slept with - they were all boys, 15 years ago, before I got married. I thought about each of them and I was so astonished by the realization that they too - wherever they were, whoever they were and whoever they were with - were also going through this. Everyone on earth, at least everyone reachable by technology, was going through this. It was as crushing as it was reassuring.

My best friends, the ones I had just five months before started a non-religious spiritual community called “Revival” with, checked in on each other every morning. How’s it today? So fucking irritated I think I’m going to hurt someone. How’s it today? Can’t stop crying. How’s it today? Grateful to be here, grateful for this house, grateful for this partner. How’s it today? I can’t do it anymore.

They were the only things I looked forward to. They were the life raft I clung to - or our friendship was, and seeing them clinging too meant that all hope wasn’t lost. If we drowned, we’d drown together.

I’d go for long walks around the neighborhood. I’d never done that before. Most of the recycling bins I’d pass were filled with empty bottles of wine and booze. I’d see people actually inside their houses, I’d see their TVs on. I’d see, on their TVs through their windows, Donald Trump behind a podium. I was so desperate that I found myself actually rooting for him. Turning to him. Say something, do something. Help us. Out of everything, that desperation scared me the most.

A friend left a glass jug on my front steps filled with warm tea made with THC oil. Around the spout there was a little paper tag that said “Mama’s Brew.” I drank it all and got higher than I’ve ever been in my life. I looked around the house and I didn’t know where I was. I tried to hide it from Chris. He was reading on the couch and I laid down next to him like his physical form could ground me, but when I closed my eyes I forgot who he was, too. Trying to figure out what life I was in was like surfing through channels - no, that’s not it, not that one either. And then finally - click - oh yes. The one with Chris, and Baxter, and Pearce. The one in Maplewood, the one where the pandemic happens.

One night after everyone had gone to sleep I sat on the couch in a dark room and got out my computer to write an email to the lead singer of my favorite band, a man I had spent two nights in two years with in the early years of my marriage. The first night we danced together in the basement of a venue he had just played at, and another person - another fan, like me - said in adoring disbelief, “I can’t believe you’re dancing with him. I can’t believe he chose you to dance with.” And then a year later, at another venue, I went up to him after the show and he was happy to see me and we hung out in his tour bus and he said it was fun flirting with me and I said I can’t do anything with you because I’m married. And he said I’m married too, but he walked me to the Arricebo cab I called and kissed me quickly before either of us could talk about it, and emailed me after to say he’d put me on the list the next time he was in town. So I opened up my computer, 11 years later, and started writing an email - “you probably don’t remember me” and was so overcome with sadness and yearning, and the regret of not staying to kiss him longer then, before I was stuck inside, before the world was ending, before my life was over. I deleted it, awash with embarrassed, pathetic shame.

My husband was adrift in his own sea, even more hopeless than I was. He would start crying and wouldn’t be able to stop. He called them panic attacks and instead of having sympathy I was resentful. He said he hated everything and one morning, after being up all night with a young child who was still very much learning to sleep, he said through sobs, “I hate him.” He was so sick he couldn’t touch the one eternally true thing within him. Instead of seeing that sickness as the most urgent need for me, instead of turning towards him, I took our child into another room and sat down shaking and thought I was completely alone, and that if any of us would survive this it would be because I refused to break.

So I retreated to a vibrant, lush, textured fantasy world. The men I had fantasized about - the rock star, yes, but the other close calls and flirtations that I had generated and kindled but kept at a low flame to avoid ever having to say I actually cheated - became my escape. As I cooked, as I did the dishes, as I lay in bed next to a child waiting for the deep rhythm of their breath to tell me I could leave, I wrote chapters in my head. Detailed dialogue - the words I wanted to hear from the people I could never hear them from.

I left my husband clinging to his deflating life raft alone, while I created my own to survive.

Years later, when masks were optional and the pandemic was “over” and there still hadn’t been any national ritual making space for us to mourn, still no real art made about what we all - every one of us on earth - had lived through, when Chris and I were getting divorced and having the one true fight we ever had about the details of who would get what and how, I snarled through sobs - “I used to think I’d walk into a room and see you hanging from the ceiling.” He said, “that’s not true, it never got that bad.”

But what is true, and how bad did it get? Who gets the final word on that? Is there one right answer?

Maybe the darkest impulse of my writing is the desperation for the final word. Maybe its something more gentle - a meandering through the dense forest of my life, catching glimmers of answers like the shadow a bird makes as it flies away.

After I write something, I read it aloud to Chris. He has always been my best reader - both the least judgmental person anyone has ever known, and the most honest, a combination I’ve never known in a human before. When we divorced and I told him that I wanted to write the truth but that it might be hard to hear, he said, “I want to read it.”

It’s now the fifth anniversary of the pandemic, though I wrote this a year ago, on a still Sunday afternoon. It’s taken me that long to feel ready to read it again, and to share it with the one person who’s opinion matters.

He listened, as he always has. He didn’t know about parts of this, and there were parts he said he didn’t remember. The darkest and the hardest part. And yet he’s willing to let me tell it.

I read once that the way we heal from trauma is by talking about it, by telling the story of it to someone who actually listens. Therapy, friendship, love. Is it all just the telling of our stories?

Everyone alive five years ago went through the pandemic, just like everyone was once born, just like many of us gave birth. The facts might look similar, but if they were all told, if we clicked through them like channels, the stories wouldn’t.

Even the stories of two people, in the same house, hunkering down for the same two weeks.