All The Lives We Did Not Lead
Reader,
Has anyone else insisted upon joy this year? And is anyone else feeling completely insane?
You must know that I have tried and failed to write this last Curbside column of the year multiple times. Part of this struggle was my foolish determination to end the year on a positive note. In the discarded pile of nonstarters, we have a piece on sincerity, on how the pandemic made us straightforward, on how we found moments of delight in a year of grief, on the joy of being in workshop again, despite the way so many people rolled their eyes at its cheesiness, at its cliché, at the problematic nature of its pitfalls, rediscovering the ways in which I loved it, being read and considered seriously, being able to afford the same to others. But I could not finish any of those pieces. I would get to somewhere in the middle and then be led astray. They would ring false, these attempts at optimism, because in each of them there was a yawning hole of silence, where a growing anger resided, an anger I had been trying to avoid for much of the year.
Because! The year hadn’t been all bad. There had absolutely been moments of wonder and delight. For example: time with loved ones. For example: the rippling sunsets I watched on those long beachside walks with my sister. For example: returning to New York, and marveling at the way a tree might turn gold. For example: chasing and being chased by an angry goose. For example: friendship. For example: laughter.
I held tight to those moments, using them to scaffold my belief that life was inching back to a kind of normality. Sure, there was nothing really normal about 20 months of mask-wearing, then double mask-wearing, turning into a human version of a walking sanitizer dispenser with my multiple squeeze bottles that hung off every bag I owned and which I proffered to every pair of hands I crossed, drying both them and my own hands out with isopropyl alcohol, trying to remedy that with oodles of cheap hand cream—well-intentioned efforts that proved ultimately inadequate, for I fear the flaky patch of snakeskin on my right wrist is here to stay—getting consistently tested twice a week, becoming accustomed to the heartstopping cycle of anticipation and relief, as I was assured, over and over, week after week, that I was covid-negative, that with this inane cycle of sanitizing and moisturizing, I’d kept myself safe. Nothing normal about that. But 2021 was certainly an improvement over the collective nightmare of 2020, and this close to the end of the year, one might be forgiven for optimism, for looking eagerly towards what the new year might bring. I have always prided myself on being good at finding joy, on insisting upon it. I have always been good at allowing myself happiness. Cruising on the high of that same optimism, a girlfriend and I booked our first vacation in two years. And while we were away, the latest variant of the coronavirus exploded all over the city. By the time we returned, everyone we knew, including my roommate, had tested positive for the virus.
Reader, I screamed.
I actually screamed. I tried, in drafts 6, 7, and 8 of this piece, to come at it from different angles, to, as they say, process the complete helplessness I’d been plunged back into, but none of it worked, I didn’t want to be rational and process—I was angry, and I wanted to stay angry. My girlfriend and I tested negative—several times, a minor miracle, all things considered—and I waited out my roommate’s virus arc by hiding out at my girlfriend’s place for a week. By the time I got home, he was well, but angry too, at the situation, perhaps, but also at me, for reasons he could not articulate, but which I suspect had to do with the unreasonableness of it all, the unfairness of the virus, the inconvenience the new strain had brought upon us both, and the frustration that after all of this time, here we were again. Stuck back in the same quagmire that had characterized March 2020, of suspicion and fear, towards the mixed messaging dispensed by the government and health boards, the external lives of those we came in contact with, and the air itself, the very air.
He left the next day, off to see some friends in a different city, chock full of antibodies and a new can’t-touch-me confidence. And me, I went for a run.
I hate exercising, but I make myself do it on occasion because it’s nice to actively hate something other than the absolute disaster that is living in the pandemic. The worst of all exercise, for me, is the outdoor run, which seems a manifestation of masochism. I am a clumsy person, with a phobia of breaking my teeth (I actually fainted on a train once, when reading a fictional account of a man having his teeth pulled; the book was A Million Little Pieces by James Frey), and running outdoors for me is to be in constant fear of tripping and falling on my face and shattering all my front teeth because I have not evolved enough to know that one should instinctively throw their hands out before them to break their fall. On top of that, I am an ugly perspirer. I don’t have a healthy glow, I look very much like a drowned rat, and parading that fact to every passerby on the street as I grunt down Central Park West is really an exercise in humility, and also, in truly being too far gone to care. When I had suffered enough, I screamed at a pigeon, which was completely unimpressed and barely fluffed its wings (another exercise in humility), then bought a bottle of cheap whiskey and looked online for places where I might procure fried chicken.
I have not stopped internally screaming since. Typically, I love the year-end period, I delight in the rituals of celebration and endings, I feel a lazy excitement for things to come. And I am generally the glass-half-full sort, able to spin the silver lining of any situation into a web of possibilities that is generally effective at huddling away the creeping impending doom that anyone who exists in a morally corrupt, capitalist, completely unequal, ideologically divided world experiences, at least once in a while. And yet this year-end, upon hearing that 31—31!!—covid-testing clinics in my area have just closed because the testers have themselves gotten the dreaded virus, it seems a completely insane, wild, hilarious choice to react by looking for the upside of all this.
Perhaps, a friend suggested gently, you need to learn to sit with both joy and rage, you need to temper your own desperation for neat endings, solutions, closures. Aren’t you a writer? Isn’t messiness your business?
Yes, I snapped, but that’s where I’d like the shitshow to stay, on the page.
Reader, I know. I know. Life is messy, right now, it’s a touch messier than usual. We have tried our best, and it hasn’t been enough. I have no neat bow of joy for you, Reader, with which to tie up the year, no aspirations of self-improvement, no resolutions with which to herald a new and uncertain year. Just this one thing, for myself, and perhaps, for you, too: I have always been good at being happy; in the year to come, I wish myself permission to rage. Have you already learned a healthy way of being angry, Reader, are you comfortable with disappointment, have you progressed to a point of understanding that joy is not necessarily a triumph, that sometimes, confronting anger where it’s due doesn’t mean canceling out the silver lining that despite it all, endures, waiting for us to pick it up again? Ah, then you are in a better place than I am. Scream, scream with me into the new year.
