It would have been enough
by Sarah Ruth Bates
My students are trying to be people, to become adults. It was hard enough to do before the collapse. It was hard enough to fit the structure before the breakage, before going without classes, without friends, schedules, rules, predictable futures.
One of my students wrote that she tried to ask the Internet when the virus would end, as if, she said, as if it were a TV show and she could look for spoilers. As if, when the tension became too much, she could break the skin of discomfort.
My students won’t know until much later how these years were difficult differently, because it is already hard enough to be alone, to be eighteen. They are already in social isolation. Like me they have anxiety; already they are struggling—barely more than half of them would have graduated in four years even if there had never been a virus.
They will not know until much later that as we Jews say, dayenu, that it would have been enough, which is a gratitude prayer,
if He had split the sea for us, and had not taken us through it on dry land, dayenu!
if He had drowned our oppressors in it, and had not fed us in the desert for forty years, dayenu!
if He had fed us in the desert for forty years and had not given us the Sabbath, dayenu!
A gratitude prayer, but for them, I flip it. Even though we humans are not supposed to declare, enough.
I got an email from another student. Reading it, I thought, If she had had bedbugs and not nowhere to sleep, if she had had nowhere else to sleep and not a mental health disorder, if she had had a mental health disorder and not a weakened immune system, it is so fucking far past enough.
Every unhappy is singular, Tolstoy says. Maybe that is a shield so they don’t know until much later: not just different, worse.
Sarah Ruth Bates is a writer based in Tucson, AZ. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Boston Globe Magazine, Hobart, Essay Daily, Aeon, Appalachia Journal, Off Assignment, and WBUR. She’s a second-year in the nonfiction MFA program at the University of Arizona, where she teaches freshman composition and edits the Sonora Review. Catch her at sarahruthbates.com and @sarahrbates.
