calculating something like normal

Last week made a year ago that I went to work in person for the last time. The students were notified on Wednesday the 11th that they would need to go home the following week to start taking classes remotely, but staff intended to continue working in person. That weekend I spent a few hundred dollars buying groceries that I could freeze. It was the last time I entered a grocery store for almost 6 months. We got an email that Sunday telling us not to come in the following day, and I haven’t been back to work in person since. 

Mari Andrews posted recently about how losing something implies that you once had it, but so many of us this year have been grieving things we never had in the first place. “I can remember the sweet days of an alternate life that I’m just now admitting will never exist,” she says. 

I think about every visit I never got to have with my grandmother in the nursing home while I could still be sure she recognized me and the funeral we didn’t get to have for her. I think about Harry going to sleep for the last time without me holding him. I think about every tango I never got to dance in churches and living rooms and foreign countries. I think about the patatas bravas at Mimi’s that I’ll never get to eat. About all the meatball and taco dinners that I didn’t have with James, the year’s worth of dinner parties that Sophie never got to host, the craft party we never had with Katie and Derrick, the cookies Elijah never brought me in the airport, conversations we never had in Sam and Nick’s living room. The people we were pulled away from or pushed suffocatingly close to. The flights I never booked and that beach trip we had to cancel. The Rusty Nail bar trivia we might have won. I think about the writers who might have inspired me at the Dogfish readings that never happened. I think about the alternate versions of ourselves that we’ll never know if we might have been. 

Of course there is also unforeseen beauty and joy in this new reality we’ve found ourselves in that we wouldn’t have known to miss if things hadn’t turned out this way. New relationships born in spite of these circumstances but in strange ways enhanced because of it. Reconnections with old friends who might have always remained distant. New hobbies. New appreciation for the things I once took for granted. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay to grieve a previously imagined present while appreciating the current one. 

I got my first vaccine dose last week. It felt simultaneously like it changed nothing and everything. People are smiling without masks in public and talking about glimpsing normalcy now, but I don’t know how to stop calculating. Calculating the number of days since the vaccine and the number of days until the next one, calculating how many people have been in my proximity in public and how many feet they were from me, calculating how long ago I might have last been exposed to the virus by that stranger who walked by too close in the grocery store, calculating the number of days that have passed since a casual interaction that to me felt like a close call. A year ago I would have told you that this level of hyper-awareness and paranoia is absolutely not sustainable for any extended period. I’m here to tell you that I was wrong about that because here I am, over a year later, still vigilant, still calculating. It is very hard for me to recognize the fine line that exists between a justifiable level of caution and over-the-top paranoia. Which is to say, I do not think there will be such thing as a tidy “after the pandemic” cross-over for me. I do not think that a switch will flip two weeks after my second vaccine where I assume I’m safe to re-enter the social world with carefree ease and joy. I think instead that new levels of normal will gently and gradually seep into each other in small increments. My family and I are planning a beach trip together since we will all be vaccinated. I’m thinking about international travel in the hopefully-not-too-distant future. These feel like things worth poking my head out of my bunker and looking forward to. 

The pharmacy where I got my vaccine was empty when I arrived. I thought it would feel momentous, but it felt strange instead—walking into a pharmacy I’ve never been to to let a pharmacist jab me with substance I don’t want to think too much about. (I didn’t even know pharmacists give vaccines.) But while I was there, a man and his elderly father came in together for their vaccines, too. We were across the room from each other and didn’t speak, but we made eye contact for a second. A moment of recognition. Now my father will be safer. Now my family can be safer. This moment may feel mundane, but it is life-altering and we are experiencing it together. Then the pharmacist said, “Kayla, you can go.” And even though I had only waited for about 5 minutes instead of the generally required 15, I got up and left, and somehow the world looked normal outside. 

Grief and Gratitude

I re-read all my New Year’s blog posts recently—7 years worth of them. I always do a recap of things I want to remember about the year—obsessively documented statistics about the number of books I’ve read (I did keep track, for the record! I read 59 this year -- 47 physical and 17 audio) and miles I’ve traveled and the sentimental images that will always pull me back to that specific time in my life. And I’ve tried to write it, over and over I’ve tried to write about 2020, but it’s felt impossible. How are you supposed to write about a year that felt like 20 years but also like such a haze that it might have been 20 seconds instead? What else can possibly be said about 2020 that hasn’t been said so many times already that it’s lost any potency? What can be said that isn’t depressing or trite? But here I am, still trying. 

There’s this steady refrain of guilt I feel at the ways in which 2020 was far less cruel to me than it has been to countless others, survivor’s guilt about near misses and silver linings. 2020 was the year I lost my grandma. Covid took away the last 3 months of her life that we could have visited her in the nursing home without a closed window between us, but at least the staff let us in for the last week and half of her life to tell her goodbye. 2020 was the year I lost Harry. Perhaps I’d never tried harder at anything than keeping that poor dog alive, and because of Covid, I wasn’t allowed in the veterinary hospital to be with him at the end. But at least I got to spend 2 months at home with him during quarantine that I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten, and at least the vet was willing to bring him to the door so I could tell him a last goodbye. At least, at least—these versions of consolation and reminders of gratitude play on loop. And to be clear—I DO feel grateful, immeasurably so, and a lot of 2020 was about recognizing that fear and grief don’t negate gratitude or joy. 

2020 for me was the Skull and Bones gang as the sun rose in the Treme on Mardi Gras morning. It was midnight tango dances until there was no one left to dance with. It was unreciprocated gifts and unanswered letters, extended hands pulled back again and again, broken promises and empty gestures, the sound of the rats in the walls at night before my apartment became habitable only by ghosts and monsters. It was fear and mental calculations and collective anxiety that made us feel better that at least we didn’t feel it alone. (At least.) It was the 3 months at my parents’ house, the outdoor funeral (at least we got to have a funeral, at least no one got sick afterward), the guitar I picked up from a stranger’s front porch and taught myself to play. The words I sang to no one. The bike rides through pot-holed streets, porch concerts, letters to and from strangers who were desperate to feel less alone. (Could there be a better city to live in during a pandemic? At least we got to be here where the musicians play on their balconies and raise their glasses to you as you bike past in the evening.) It was so, so many paranoia-induced Covid tests, and that moment of doubt after each negative result when I asked myself, “But how do I know it’s really negative?” It was a hundred thousand emails and zoom calls and “It’s not so much working from home as it is living at work.” And then there was August and new letters and tentative park visits, a new apartment with a balcony and an herb garden and fewer monsters. It was Michael surprising me with a new foster dog and the foster dogs who’ve let us borrow them ever since. It was reunions and reconnections with kindred spirits who felt like friends and with old friends who feel like new ones. It was levee paths to the end of the world and back. It was camping on mountainsides, apple-picking in valleys, fall leaves to make us forget the hardest parts of the year. It was hurricanes, swimming pools, s’mores in fireplaces, camping on my parents’ front porch, and election results on my birthday. It was Pudgy and Chewie wearing their winter sweaters at Christmas, a million meals cooked together, surprises, generosity, and learning how to trust kindness when it’s offered.

Words felt too slippery to hold onto, so I quit trying to trap them. Now they feel bottled and as restless as the rest of us. It’s been a long 4 years. It’s been a long year. It’s been a long January already. But look, we made it this far.