maybe just try to survive
I’m writing this on a Tuesday that feels like a Saturday or a Sunday or a Thursday or any day, really, since days of the week no longer mean anything. The last time I went to a restaurant was March 11, the last time I went to a friend’s house was March 13. I’ve been to grocery store maybe six or seven times in the last seventy-three days. I do not know anyone who has died from coronavirus, and I am safe in my house with my husband and three dogs and I remain employed, one of the 40% of Americans who was able to transfer her work fully remote.
I have gardened in my garden and sketched out plans for a new one. I’ve pulled kudzu out by the root and seeded clover and watched it sprout. I’ve planted strawberries and lettuce, read more novels in two months than I have in two years, gotten drunk on Zoom and made sour cream from scratch. I watch movies and television, I ordered new running shoes, I have let my bangs grow out and my eyebrows too. I am bored and sad and depressed and safe and grateful and I spend a lot of time thinking about my next meal and whether or not it is too early to start drinking. It often is, and I do it anyway.
I have made to-do lists and then erased them, wrote maybe just try to survive a global pandemic on the white board instead. I have started and abandoned poems, gotten angry when I look at photos of vacations I would normally take at this time, mourned the fact that my calendar once showed that I was going to spend six weeks of this summer teaching abroad in Lucca, Italy. On the day that I went into Google Calendar and erased Lucca, then erased Sewanee, I didn’t cry. I saved that for later in the week, when I got very drunk on wine, watched the last episode of The Good Place, and then cried hysterically and lubricated with merlot. Even in quarantine, it seems, I struggle to emote in healthy ways. I’m aware. God, am I aware of my own brain. Why do you think I drink so much, and gobble lorazepam every morning, with my single cup of mostly decaf coffee?
It’s been a minute since I blogged. I’m back now, tentatively, to see how it feels. Maybe it will help, maybe it won’t, but either way it can stand as a record of what 2020 did to me and my efforts, futile as they felt some days, to survive it.
I have gardened in my garden and sketched out plans for a new one. I’ve pulled kudzu out by the root and seeded clover and watched it sprout. I’ve planted strawberries and lettuce, read more novels in two months than I have in two years, gotten drunk on Zoom and made sour cream from scratch. I watch movies and television, I ordered new running shoes, I have let my bangs grow out and my eyebrows too. I am bored and sad and depressed and safe and grateful and I spend a lot of time thinking about my next meal and whether or not it is too early to start drinking. It often is, and I do it anyway.
I have made to-do lists and then erased them, wrote maybe just try to survive a global pandemic on the white board instead. I have started and abandoned poems, gotten angry when I look at photos of vacations I would normally take at this time, mourned the fact that my calendar once showed that I was going to spend six weeks of this summer teaching abroad in Lucca, Italy. On the day that I went into Google Calendar and erased Lucca, then erased Sewanee, I didn’t cry. I saved that for later in the week, when I got very drunk on wine, watched the last episode of The Good Place, and then cried hysterically and lubricated with merlot. Even in quarantine, it seems, I struggle to emote in healthy ways. I’m aware. God, am I aware of my own brain. Why do you think I drink so much, and gobble lorazepam every morning, with my single cup of mostly decaf coffee?
It’s been a minute since I blogged. I’m back now, tentatively, to see how it feels. Maybe it will help, maybe it won’t, but either way it can stand as a record of what 2020 did to me and my efforts, futile as they felt some days, to survive it.