Double-edged Emotional Swords
I arrived in the US on a Thursday night and spent just 24 hours at my mom's apartment in Rhode Island before leaving again. My best friend, Lisa, picked me up on her drive north from New York City to Boston so that we could spend the weekend with our friends, Jack and Kit, in the city where we met and went to college together.
The four of us had last seen each other in January 2020 in New York City. E and I had added visiting Lisa onto our Christmas 2019 trip to see family in the US and Canada, and Jack and Kit came down from Boston to join us. Throughout the pandemic, I've been grateful many times that our last trip home included time with some of our chosen family in addition to time with our biological families.
So, it was great to see Lisa, Jack, and Kit a few weeks ago, and it was strange not to have E there with us. It was also an intense start to my trip, considering how recently I had been fully vaccinated and how few people I'd been in close physical proximity to for the preceding seven months.
Pandemic Year One was much easier for me than Pandemic Year Two because in 2020, E and I continued spending in-person time with our friends/chosen family, Eben and Laura. We ate dinner at each other's houses, hugged one another, and were generally in a 'pod' together. But in January 2021, when Germany entered its second lock down and Eben and Laura both had jobs working in preschools, we stopped seeing each other in-person. With the exception of occasional walks or bike rides together, we didn't spend any quality in-person time with them until the end of August when E and I were fully vaccinated.
Hanging out with people in the US, whose pandemic experiences and vaccination timeline were so different from my own, was challenging sometimes. Although it was a challenge I had anticipated, it was still hard. And, of course, there were challenges I didn't anticipate.
When I hugged Jack and Kit goodbye at the end of our weekend together, I started crying. Now, crying isn't an unusual emotional reaction for me, but goodbyes don't typically inspire tears. I've visited my friends and family in the US before and said goodbye without tearing up. But I've never visited during a pandemic before. And I've never felt so keenly the uncertainty around when I'll see the people I love next.
Lisa and I keep in touch with semi-regular video calls, but Jack and Kit are people who I love dearly, carry in my heart constantly, and don't talk to for months on end. Usually that's fine. I'm actually blessed with many friends who fall into this category. We pick up where we left off, when we're able to, and we trust that we love each other, even when we're not in touch. But, not knowing when we'll next get to pick up where we left off has never felt so dire to me before.
Toward the end of my trip, Lisa texted me to see how I was doing. I told her it was great to see people, but "I leave everyone wondering when I'll see them next and wishing I had more time. And at the same time, I'm starting to feel ready to get home and back to my life and my routines. I miss E."
She wrote back some kind and consoling words, including, "I'm sorry everything is a double-edged emotional sword."
And, boy, did that phrasing resonate! I kept thinking of the word 'bittersweet' to describe my trip, and discarding it as too cloying and cliched. It wasn't bittersweet to visit my friends and family during a pandemic, it was stronger and sharper than that.
During this trip, I visited another friend, Becky, who I used to see and confide in every single day when we worked together at the Museum of Science in Boston -- wrangling volunteers and part-time staff, managing our disorganized manager, and feeling chronically underappreciated. The last time I saw her in person was Fall 2018, just six months after E and I moved abroad, on our first trip back to the States. When Becky and I saw each other then, we ran into each other's arms and held on tight, rocking back and forth and saying how good it was to see one other. When I arrived at her home on this trip, eager to meet her 1-year-old daughter, I stood a respectful six feet away, grinning sheepishly underneath my mask, while we decided what pandemic precautions we wanted to take for the evening.
That experience wasn't bittersweet. It was a double-edged emotional sword, heavy in my arms and dangerous to wield near a toddler.