A Year Later or Tomorrow Too Soon.
March 22, 2021 is my mother’s birthday and the day I receive my second shot. “Second shot” is now a part of our lexicon, giving us a potentially false sense of security and the promise of some semblance of freedom from constant fear. It is a year and a week exactly since the fear took hold — something I remember vividly because the eve of lockdown is my own birthday. The night before we retreat to our insular spaces for two weeks, we know nothing and know we know nothing and dine as a family around my small dining room table, making sure to not hug each other and to use plastic ware. We share dan dan noodles and aerosols for hours that night and though I have been on and off airplanes for two weeks, we all get out unscathed. The world isn’t as lucky.
The morning of my second shot, I wake up bleeding, a reminder of my own luck and vitality. Hours before, my mother, 35 years and a week after she birthed me by emergency C-Section, gets her second shot. 35 years and a week ago, she almost dies by pre/eclampsia, and today, the day 67 years ago she is birthed by a 41 year old mother, life and her livelihood are shot back into her. Though I spend two hours every morning for a month now pouring through vaccine back channels, it is her patience and prudence and Boomer specific belief in the system that gets the shot in her arm.
The very same system contacts me a week later to schedule because my BMI makes me obese and therefore a candidate. Until I find a doctor I love in my 34th year, every doctor I see reminds me of this — my weight, that I could stand to lose some and have I considered less carbohydrates and more cardio. That I am too much and doing not enough. I feel conflicted about accepting any of it and my own ethics fail to give me any comfort. But I schedule an appointment, I get a shot. Life finds a way when you have private healthcare.
A vacant music venue is my site, it’s four walls — a cavern of memories. I fall in love in this venue and I have my heart broken in this venue, sometimes in the same night. In this venue, I swoon over boys with sweaty hair and decent guitar skills. It is here I scream the angsty words of teenage petulance along with hundreds of my nearest and dearest for the night. And today, where there used to be a mosh pit, there is process and procedure. In place of stale beer and sticky floors, there is purel and rigor. My teenaged broken heart, replaced by hearts, broken over lost lives, lost friends, the year, lost.
In the space of four weeks, the air here is different. The levity is now palpable, together we are circling what was before. It’s an out of body experience — the first place there’s a desire to dawdle, to be engulfed by the crowd, to remember what life was like before. The same nurse gives me both shots. I tell her that she’s going to have to buy me dinner if she wants to keep seeing me and we both laugh, and I cry. I thank her an uncomfortable amount of times and go sit, with the rest of the lucky ones until my time is called and I am free to go. It is a beautiful day and I feel the sun penetrate the skin on my face for the first time since winter took hold. The universe and I celebrate quietly. We are the lucky ones.
At night we celebrate my mother’s birthday, vaccinated, with strip steaks and caviar laden baked potatoes on tie dyed plates, an opulent spread in universally lean times. In this moment, we are Marie Antionette. We recline while the world suffers, indulging in the unclean thoughts of tomorrow.
Remembering the before is not as important to me as remembering the during. Generally, we have a hard time in this country teaching our children, ourselves, how to mourn, how to grieve. We are scared of it and so we don’t do it. We are in fear of everything, of our freedoms from and our freedoms to, of the idols we create in our mind and the idols we create for each other. We are scared of what we cannot see and we are scared of what we witness everyday. We are selfish and self loathing and care less about those around us and more about the me of it all. It is easier to care about the me of it all, less scary when everything is insular.
I have a bad habit of sitting with grief too much and I think of this when I wake up 12 hours later unable to move, drenched in sweat, nearly incapable of forming sentences. My immune system, they say, is strong. The vaccine, they say, is working. I sleep for hours and then I sleep for more. In my moments of lucidity, I’m convinced that this fugue state is purposeful. That in order to cross over into whatever it is that will somewhat resemble the before, it is imperative that I am forced to sit with the now. In these moments, I have the privilege of knowing that I will wake up tomorrow with the impending freedom to hug my mother without fear of killing her. Even in this fevered state, I consider those who sat in this state unsure of what tomorrow would bring, what freedoms would be taken from them physically or emotionally, how their minds must have fought to consider the inability to say goodbye fully, the unfairness of it all. While I am fully aware of what’s on the other of my own personal fugue state, the number of people who didn’t, who don’t have the same luxury is disgraceful and growing, a product in large part due to the me of it all. In this moment, I am overwhelmed by the grief of the unknown, the unfairness of what we don’t know and why we don’t know it. I imagine the fear of the unknown as the mind loses its ability to differentiate reality from ethereal, decaying like a tooth or building a fortress of plaque like the gums supposed to protect it. Moving farther and farther away from comprehension and closer to abject, horrific fantasy of the could, the would, the should.
We teach our kids to get on their knees and pray every night. To speak to nebulous entities and ask for forgiveness for wrongdoings or to grant them a better tomorrow. We pray to idols we don’t understand and don’t conjure the voices of our tangible ancestors enough. We create so little time to reflect and often when we do, it’s in acute search of an answer as opposed to appreciation of meandering thoughts that may not lead to any just or comprehensive solution.
We don’t mourn enough, we don’t sit with our grief enough. It is not productive enough for us. We value productivity, the amount of information you can process in a unit of time, the processing speed of that information most critical. This year it becomes outstandingly clear that more information is not better. Better information is better. And better information doesn’t always come from seeking it out, sometimes it seeks you out. And it’s not always words on a page, and it doesn’t always come with a byline.
The best business advice I ever receive is “Know what you know, but know what you don’t know.” I think of this often as I think of the past year. Our never ending search for knowledge to stay safe, to stay sane, to just stay for another day to put one foot in front of the other. We are so good at pretending to know what we don’t know that we rarely stop to consider what we don’t know. Maybe this year has taught us that focusing on knowing what you don’t know is exponentially more valuable than hedging on what you do. Because at the end of the day everything you know could change into something you don’t, but nothing has more potential, positive or negative, than the things you don’t know.
