"You don't get to rehearse"
I’ve been talking (and writing) a big game about how this is one of those moments in history where everything changes, down to the smallest elements of the routines we rely on, like shaking hands as a greeting or gathering in groups or leaving the house, but the truth is that a little part of my brain is still stumbling onward as if this is just going to last one week, two weeks, and then everything will snap back to normal. I’ll wake up a few Tuesdays from now and the salon will be open again, all our appointments booked as normal, our three-weekly clients coming in for fades, our eight-weekers back for root retouches and maybe a few new highlights for spring, isn’t that the best season to go blonde? The farmer’s market in the little metered side parking lot will open for the season — it’s not a big market, just a few stalls selling tomatoes and onions and corn and handmade jewelry, and sometimes they set up a small soundstage for local musicians — and the days will keep getting longer. The sun will be up when I go to work in the morning, and it’ll still be up when I leave at 8PM, and it’ll have spent the hours in between slanting in through the windows in our living room, soaking into the carpet, making it the warmest spot in the entire house. In this future, maybe we’ll take some time off to visit friends, a belated honeymoon, though more likely we’ll tell ourselves that maybe next year would be better, and if we keep working through the summer instead we’ll be able to save a little more, maybe set up those surgery consults, maybe buy a new sofa, a dream deferred like so many others for a hypothetical future where we never have a bad month that claws a hole in our savings that takes three more months to fill.
Even as I write it, I know it’s not true. This, I think, is what people talk about when they say that the first stage of grief is denial. It’s not really something you choose to do; your brain does it regardless of the fact that you know better, because a little part of you continues onwards in the timeline you were living in before, towards the future you expected. It’s a little bit like the way that when a far-off star explodes, its light takes years to reach us, and for those years we still see the star as it was but no longer is, unaware that what we’re really seeing is a last gasp, an afterimage, the echo that lingers in a symphony hall long after the conductor has cut off the orchestra’s last note. If you’ve lost somebody, you might know this as those awful moments in the first few days afterwards when you think, Oh, I should tell — because they’re at the forefront of your mind for reasons that you don’t remember — and then you do. There’s a quote attributed to Edna St. Vincent Millay, in one of her private letters, that I think about in this context.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
There’s another quote that I think about, which is from Buffy. (This entire newsletter could be about where Whedon’s work succeeds and where it fails, which it does more often, but there is one character archetype he consistently pinpoints, which is the person undone, whether by trauma or grief or the long, slow wearing-down of the self that comes from facing overwhelming odds for an interminable amount of time. These, as it turns out, are the characters who most interest me.)
But I don’t understand! I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I knew her, and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead … anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid! And … and Xander’s crying and not talking, and … and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why!
I know why. I know why and how, and a lot of the other Ws as well, and still part of my brain is carrying onwards like a Looney Toon in midair, as if sheer momentum and blind faith will keep me aloft and will solid ground into place where there is none. Part of me thinks that if I just behave as if we’ll be back to normal in two weeks, three weeks — the war’ll be over by Christmas — then it’ll happen. I keep having to remind myself that it won’t. Yesterday the United Kingdom went into police-enforced lockdown; the day before that, Ohio did, the latest in a series of states to enact so-called “stay-at-home” orders designed to implement a de facto quarantine, emptying the streets and closing businesses and keeping people indoors in an effort not to contain COVID-19 — the chance to do that came and went before we even knew it was necessary — but to keep those who have been thus far untouched away from those who have not, and vice versa, to press pause on its spread, and protect those for whom it is a death sentence: among them the immunocompromised, older people, and those with vulnerabilities they may not even know about.
Many of the businesses that closed will not open again. Many of the people who used to trust that a hug or handshake can be harmless never will again. Many gatherings will never be quite the same, whether because of the hypervigilance this will undoubtedly instill in so many or because familiar faces will be absent. Everybody who lives through this period of history will be changed by it. This is an intergenerational trauma, not the first in this generation but perhaps one of the worst, which is saying something in a millennium marked by the forever wars and economic recession and the global rise of the fascist and Christian right.
Trauma changes people, marks a point in their lives with “before” and “after,” but I have to keep reminding myself that while this is no longer before, it is natural that parts of me are taking longer to realize that than others. I can trust my own judgment, the proprioceptors that recognize shifting ground, the instincts that I can’t explain or rationalize but that say, It’s time to let go. Holding on will hurt more, in the long run. But I want to remember that farmer’s market, the way I marked the seasons from behind that front desk — by the length of the days and the color of the light, the small talk about wedding season and the holiday rush, our regular clients and the ones we only saw once every few months — the little places where love accumulated with repetition. In those ways, it was not a bad world to live in. I will make a practice of looking for those same places, those moments of startling happiness, in our new after. Spring still comes.
—R.