"Any other world"
“Wait,” Dylan said, reading whatever the fuck I wrote and sent out the day before yesterday. “What do you mean, ‘at the beginning of this week’? Isn’t it… Tuesday?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “For me the week began on Friday.”
But no. It was Tuesdaylemon, which is what you call it when it’s Tuesday but it feels like it should be Friday at absolute earliest. (This works for any day of the week as long as you add “-lemon.” It’s Wednesdaylemon. It’s Thursdaylemon, today. Tomorrow will at long last be Fridaylemon.)
That should give you some sense of how I’m doing with the linear passage of time, and in fact the overall idea that one day is somehow distinct from the next. It’s all one big news cycle, now, one long uninterrupted blur of bad headlines and worse statistics and the semi-hysterical realization that almost everything really does not matter at all. Do you remember what it was like a little more than a month ago, when the world was just starting to end and we didn’t know what was going to happen next? I barely do. That, I’ve realized, is probably part of why I started whatever this newsletter is. We will all be different when this is over — though it will never really be over, because it will always have happened. We will never again be people who haven’t lived through this. The world will never again be a world where this hasn’t happened. There is no going back to what normal meant before, no end date to the ways this will change things. What I mean when I say “when this is over” is “when we forget that there was a time before this.”
Here is a brief glimpse, then, into what things were like 38 days ago. Dylan and I ate dinner with his family. Nobody hugged each other, but Bob, the best dog in the world, made clear that he did not care for social distancing. When we left their house, we all knew that it was the last time we’d see each other for a long time, let alone eat around the same table. The sunset was a real stunner, bloody tangerine, and change was in the air already. It was chilly, but not too cold anymore, tiptoeing into spring. People were just starting to buy supermarkets out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer and cough suppressant, and everyone was looking at each other with the same expression of slight embarrassment, the same look of, Well, I know I’m probably being a little silly, but at least so are you. The world, or our small corner of it, was right on the verge of tipping over into the place we are now, but the great wheel of history had not yet picked up momentum. We were still sitting at the very top of the Ferris wheel, waiting for the wind to pick up and the world to start turning again, and there was still the slim chance that we were all being a little ridiculous, the possibility that in a few weeks we would all pretend we’d never been afraid and suffer magnanimous ridicule from those who had been less rabbit-hearted.
39 days ago, I had to convince my boss that we should close the salon before the government closed it for us. I told him that it would be bad optics to wait that long, and eventually he conceded. One of my coworkers’ children had already been sick, scary sick — having trouble breathing, running a 103°F fever that wouldn’t break even with ibuprofen and acetaminophen, lethargic, refusing food — so sick that she called out of work three days in a row, which is a long time when your paycheck is entirely commission-based plus tips. On the second day, she told me that after taking him to the ER and spending hours there, his healthcare providers opted to treat his symptoms without conducting any further tests. The day after that, she texted me, “His lungs are clear now and he didn’t have an ear infection or strep so it’s tough to tell where his fever is coming from. I’m sure it’s more viral than anything at this point.”
People say all the time that they just knew things they couldn’t have — though of course it’s more likely that people make observations they aren’t aware of, pick up on microexpressions they aren’t consciously tracking, and so on and so forth. At the time, I asked my coworker if she thought her child had COVID-19. We weren’t sure, but for the three days that her son had a fever that wouldn’t break, I texted her a few times a day to see how he was doing, and every time I waited for a reply I held my breath and thought, as quietly as I could, God forbid. In retrospect, obviously, we’ll never know. Maybe he and Dylan just had the same unrelated severe respiratory infection that lasted for three or four days and left them unable to function or breathe. I hope, if I’m being honest, that they didn’t — that they both had COVID-19, probably from the same transmission vector — because that means that they and the people around them were already exposed. It means they might be safe.
This is selfish, I know. I don’t care. We didn’t know that we should have been afraid, that we should have stayed at home. Service workers get sick all the time, and we come to work anyway because our paychecks do not give us the latitude to act in the best interests of the people around us. Living perpetually on the edge of insolvency limits the scope of your self-interest; it shrinks your world into two-week pay cycles, four-week rent cycles, how much you can spend on groceries, where you can afford to shop, what stores it isn’t even worth going into because one purchase will put you over your weekly budget. It compresses your humanity. It leaves you in a permanent state of reactivity, when all you think about is how much everything costs, how pennies add up, how to survive until your next payday — how impossible it seems that you’ll ever find a way out. It costs me less now to live than it did when I was working 50 hours a week. The cycles I run on are different, too, less excruciating: weekly T injections, laundry every four days, buzzing my hair every week and a half, rent every four weeks — easier to pay now that I’m on unemployment than it was when I worked full-time, again. It is cruelly ironic that in the midst of historic tragedy, my life has in many ways become less stressful than it has been in the years I’ve spent working flat-out to afford being alive. That isn’t right. That shouldn’t be how the world works.
I think all the time about something Joanna Newsom said about her husband, who is, of course, unfortunately for this quote’s profundity, Andy Samberg.
Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.
When I was a child, I shared a room with my younger sister, and every night I could hear her breathing from the other side of the room. Sometimes when I woke up in the dark the room would be quiet, and I would hold my own breath until I heard that she was alive. Now, when I wake up at night or in the morning, I roll over and wait until I can see Dylan’s ribs rising and falling. Sometimes, when I’m still asleep or he’s sleeping at an angle, it takes me a minute to register the motion. Every time I hold my breath and wait.
—R.