I’m here, there, shuffling from the living room to the kitchen.
What’s a living room? We do our living here? Ok, fine. Let’s say we do. My slippers scuff, scuff, scuff because I don’t bother with shoes too much now. Or any pants except soft pants. Hard pants have been dismissed by attrition and draped over hangers in a forgotten dark nook arrayed alongside soft, middle aged fabrics with natural dyes that no one will see for years. Even hard pants with stretch in them have been given pink slips.
You know what? Go fuck yourselves, hard pants. You, of an era that includes, how did we say it? Others. While we’re at it, I’ve also quickly moved on from eyeliner goals, thoughts about striving, or baseball, or live music, serving platters for dinner guests, summer blockbuster matinees or ornamental jewelry. And obviously, I’m never, ever, wearing a bra again.
I arrive at the kitchen, slippers silent at our destination, and I no longer have any idea what we’re doing here together. I’m not really hungry, and neither are they, fake “boiled wool” knockoffs, pilly from cheap construction. So, hell, I wash my hands while I’m here, I guess, because that’s what we do now. All the days, all the hours, we wash. In small victories, I pump out a silly string of lotion I did manage to get before we started to self-quarantine.
It was a Friday.
Feels funny to even type the word out, a capital letter announcing a definite thing, a space and a time with the velocity hurtling itself toward a “weekend”, the F of two Ss to come, whatever that meant. What even is anticipation now? That was 12 days ago, a generation, an epoch, when midnight to midnight had names instead of numbers, when my delusions of possibility in the face of a nefarious cabal of elected federal officials were merely dying on the vine, rancid, but still edible, a drumline of maybes and hope, which it turns out, is not a thing with feathers. Hope is a thing with blinders and a ballgag.
It was when, over there, the big screen gave off light. Where I’d stare at a toasted demon on the television, a stupid vile vindictive oblong canned ham of a man who, no matter what, does the worst thing. I’ve been slack-jawed, engulfed in fury, a quiet cyclone of rage for years now. So I turn him off. This is what we have made together.
This was a bygone era before I referred to Lord of the Flies 3 times a day and when I wasn’t waking up in a panic under countryside darkness, imagining the loneliness and terror of people in prison, in detention, alone on stretchers in chilly hospital hallways. 1:40 in some morning, any morning, and I’m listening to a bug careen into the light fixture over and over, the fixture offering it nothing but certain expiration.
Bugs.
They’re just like us.
By 3:30 I enter the fugue world, a place of truth horrors with time for their work. There is now only time, expanding and contracting so often, with a horizon line so long, it becomes a dot, or a galaxy, or a hammer. I breathe in and out, my lungs free of the virus so far, and I picture the people unhomed, people awake for days working in grocery aisles, hazmatted people bringing out the lonely dead to refrigerated trucks waiting in tented circus triages that were once parking lots. I think about all the women encased in small spaces with fantastically abusive men. All spaces are small spaces with men like this. And I think about when I didn’t reckon daily with the notion that these terrors have always been here. And I’m not sure, knowing this, how I’ve ever slept at all.
It is 4:09 am and I’m down here in the kitchen, having given up on the bed, my slippers waiting in the dark to bring me here, lugging my organs and soft tissue around this place, waiting. I go up and down the stairs, into little rooms to do, I don’t know, things. Or parts of things, really. Over there the laundry is clean, but it’s on the dining room table. It’s fine. So, poof, now the table’s a closet. But the table is for puzzles. So again, I wonder, does the sun come up just cackling at all of us, or is it the only fiery thing of mercy, something warm while we forget our faces.
Across the globe there is a place where they say this chapter is ending.
They call it a chapter. In this country, the people made extra buildings to house legions of the sick who are now healed or dead. The buildings are emptying out so much that the country can close them up. They are saying the people can walk in the streets again, together. They are saying, in this nation, that on what they called “Thursday”, there were no new infections reported. They talk about the economy, about work and money and a phrase they trot out like a show dog, “return to normal”. I imagine still-masked people emerging, staggered, embracing each other after months, and the thought of it, the pure fiction of touch, tightens the sinews all the way up my throat. I feel it in my ears even.
There will not be a return to normal. There will be a Before, and there will be an After, for those of us who are lucky, and if luck is a currency we still invest in. The scars will be unimaginable and the anguish will be known only in backward glances, in people carrying around truncated death marches of goodbyes they never got to have, in the ruin of scarred lungs and whatever else we don’t even know yet. Or in writing or in celluloid, because amnesia and denial are far, far more potent than any kind of devastating truth. The people with the money, all that goddamned money, will demand we be done with the virus, well before the virus is done with us, and they will set the rules, as they always do. They will tire of compassion and science, after singing a trite song of praise and honor for a few months. They will cut checks to keep people quiet. They will fire up the machine, and they will watch legions of people end in a cornucopia of crude, abrupt ways that never had to be. Their demands will eventually be engulfed in a resentment detonation that is surely on this road the toasted demon regime will continue to quarterback. It will demand, soon, that the days once again don their tap shoes and perform in set pieces of 7.
But for now the numbers on the clock change their shapes at relentless, even, intervals struggling for any kind of story at all, reaching through the long night for their names.
Sara Seinberg lives in Western MA where she makes awkward and friendly pottery, writes some, and walks in the woods and by the river as often as possible. She lives with her wife, the baddest butch in the world.
