"Dear Forgiveness"
Sunday marked 13 days indoors. It was also the second day that I woke up with a level of anxiety that normally takes me several hours of consciousness to achieve. The weather took a turn for the lionish in the last few days of March, as storm front after storm front rolled over Cleveland. Saturday was bracketed by downpours — a roll of thunder woke me up, and we went to sleep as a second line of clouds began to spark lightning — and Sunday was one of those blustery early-spring days that threatens to strip the trees of their new growth. The roads were streaked with mud from all the rain, and the lake was full and choppy, white horses on deep blue. On our way back across town from east to west, we ran into a police blockade near the downtown Cleveland Clinic campus.
Everybody is waiting. If you don’t work on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis — in a pharmacy or a hospital or a grocery store, in emergency dispatch or delivery — then you, like me, are sitting at home scrolling through Twitter, clearing push notifications from your phone screen, aware that just out of sight history is being written. New York City’s 911 system is receiving as many calls daily as it did on September 11, 2001. As of Sunday, the city had one week’s worth of medical supplies left. With more than 82,400 COVID-19 cases, the United States has more than any other country in the world.
What happens next? We can guess, but there’s no way to know for sure. On Sunday, President Donald Trump (R) extended federal social distancing guidelines until April 30. The beaches, as it turns out, will not be open by Easter. For him to do this, a large number of people must have lined up and presented him with extremely convincing evidence that not doing so would cost him more politically than rushing to defibrillate the economy. (The potential loss of millions of lives is only a consideration for the current president with regard to its effect on his re-election chances.) Given that he was elected by the economically anxious, a neat little euphemism that also encompasses those worried about the allegedly economic effects of (for example) treating women, trans people, and people of color like equal citizens, the worst-case scenario for pushing a return to normalcy by April 12 was likely much worse than has been reported. Right now we are dealing with fairly minimal supply-chain disruption, for example; there is still food on the shelves of many grocery stores.
Over the last few days, I have been feeling something that is partly depression and partly grief, the kind of wild-eyed, ash-streaked grief that you used to hire moirologists, or professional mourners, to experience so you didn’t have to go through it yourself. It’s the sense of primal, visceral loss of the future you thought you would have, the futures you dreamed of, the possibilities you imagined for yourself. It’s Esther Greenwood’s fig tree.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
When I was a child, my parents and I visited some friends who had a fig tree in their backyard, and we sat around and ate the ripe fruit, which I didn’t care for then but have since come to enjoy. They’re such fleshy fruit, so inarguably organic. You cannot eat a fig without remembering that it grew on a tree, was pollinated by a wasp, exists to generate more fig trees. I don’t remember, now, who the friends were, or where their yard was, or what else happened that day — I just remember scrambling around on the flagstones, playing imagination games, as the adults talked. And that my father told me figs would taste like honey.
Watching a future collapse in front of you is like watching your crop rot in the fields, your harvest wither on the branch. You don’t realize how much you count on tomorrow until it’s yanked out from under you, until the blight has left nothing salvageable. The last time I felt like this was three years ago, when I was finally putting together the pieces of my transness, watching all the futures I’d imagined and dreamed of as a woman dissolve into smoke and mirrors. I didn’t think I would survive the loss of all those possible selves. Some trans people say that a key part of their self-identification process was the realization that they could not imagine themselves growing old as their assigned gender. I am not one of them. I imagined myself in my thirties and fifties and seventies; I imagined myself continuing on my current career trajectory, changing everything about my life, going grey, getting lonely. It wasn’t the happiest future, but it felt like the likeliest and the best I could imagine for myself, and when I had to let it go, I realized that I had been excited to settle, like water flowing downhill. I wouldn’t have been happy in that future, but I already loved the person I would have been. I think you probably would have, too. I am still sad that she didn’t get to exist. This, I think, is the hard work of grieving.
It took me a while, then, to pick out all the little shards of future, like corpse-glass, littered throughout my life. It is taking me a while now. Before, I was working on fiction, taking a first tentative look at the publishing process. I was wondering if this was the year we’d be able to take a long weekend in a cabin, or maybe visit New York for the first time since I moved two years ago (no longer an option in any case). I was thinking about our wedding anniversary, and our someday-soon plans to move back to the East Coast, maybe, and our someday-someday plans to travel, to find somewhere to be happy, somewhere green: one fig after another, going soft and rotten. I don’t know what publishing will look like when this is all over. I don’t know if we’ll be able to travel, whether we’ll have the financial means or whether it’ll even be legal. I don’t know what “happy” will look like six months, a year, five years from now. You don’t realize how much you have invested in the future until it changes shape and slips through your fingers.
When I was figuring out that I was trans, I had the worst anxiety dreams of my life. At least once, I managed to have a panic attack in my sleep so severe that it woke me up with my hands pressed to my chest. Every night I went to sleep aware that I didn’t know who I might be when I woke up, afraid of what the answer might be. There was a hallway in one of the New York apartments I lived in that stretched from the bathroom, at one extreme, to the front door. It had only one window, near the bathroom, and at night it was the darkest place I’ve ever been. I walked down that hallway unable to see my hand in front of my face, unable to see the walls, putting one foot in front of the other and counting footsteps until I came around the corner into the kitchen. This is like that — waiting for the blow to land, the dust to settle, the ground to stop shaking. Then we can make something out of what remains.
—R.