What day is it? And in what month?

Here I am, writing song lyrics as blog post headlines again like this is 2005 and I am still young and thinking about the future.

A few days ago, I looked at myself in the mirror, this decaying, older face, and started feeling nostalgic for these older times — years that I know were not that great, years marked with anxiety, but because at a certain point I had good hair, or was thin[ner], or felt like myself, or something — I thought, wow, that was a nice time.

It passed. It was not. I reminded myself that while my hair is not great and I am not thin, I cannot romanticize this, based on some fleeting memory of a one-off great photo. I saw a terrible photo of myself too last week, hidden away in some folder, and wished I had a physical copy so I could rip it up. It isn’t too difficult to bring up the other memories to balance all of this out: working constantly, feeling hardened, every day, by my work, working in an endless cycle of feeling anxious, then buoyant, then defensive, and then starting it all over again, and never really stopping to realize that I was learning something in this process.

Anyway. It is day something-something of the lockdown. I am not counting. It is no longer quiet during the day. There is a persistent hum of traffic. Cars honk, as if in a procession, at rush hour. Then it is quiet. The police siren blares: going once, twice, gone. It is time to shut down.

Some days, I am even thankful for transcription, for the voice of someone else coming through the laptop. I just watched the first two Godfather films. I have spent my time working, reading, knitting, working out, complaining about working out, eating so much that I am terrified of myself, standing in line at Nimco, and putting a shopping basket between myself and the dudebros in the supermarket aisle who seem to have missed the global memo on masks and social distancing. In some ways, what this has in common with my former, working-non-stop life, is that I don’t plan for the next day. Every day feels like a blur, except this time around it is sometimes a blur of nothingness that still feels weary. Some days, I work too much, and my body feels broken by the unending glare of the screen, with no respite in the form of the errands I once thought were such a burden on my time. I don’t think about the next week, or month.

The future only exists in tomorrows.

—

I read a lot of great things recently. Fran! Like all Fran Lebowitz interviews, this too is utterly delightful. In the interview, Fran Lebowitz mentioned she was going to read The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine, which I then read and have been unable to shake. It is so good that I am almost terrified of reading it again, to experience a rush of emotion so strong that when I finished the book I cried in one short, weird bout, the kind of crying that rarely feels cathartic. [I cry a lot, but it’s never cathartic really, just exhausting]

I read, and loved, these essays by Lina Mounzer in Lithub, and by Sadia Khatri in EOS.

Mounzer’s writing is so, so good, and this passage is amazing:

See, this indoor life, with dread consistently right outside the door: this is the life that forged me, the life into which I was born. Throughout the whole long decade of the 1980s the civil war raged outside, and we children read and played pretend and made up games of our own devising in the shelter of bedrooms and bathrooms and hallways. There were long hours and days without electricity, often without running water, the squeal of battery-powered neon lights the background to every conversation. Though I didn’t see it that way then, what it comes down to is that all of us had to make a life worth living out of whatever we found in the interior spaces—of the house, of ourselves. And at the end of all those long, dark hallways, there was always the shining promise of a future that would gloriously unfurl “when it’s all over.” (Maybe this is why I’ve always found it more pleasurable somehow to dream of a life rather than to live it).

It’s my dirty secret that when I long for childhood, I find myself also somehow longing for the war, or at least the whole culture it enforced, of an indoor, interior space that had to be consistently fortified against the horrors of the outside with food and books and play and love.