This was the month that Seattle started to shut down, a year ago. It’s the last month that I ate inside a restaurant. We were scheduled to go to Italy that March, just as Covid was starting to take hold there. Those few weeks before we were set to leave were fraught – were we cancelling out of paranoia? Would we look back and think, “Well, that was silly. It all turned out to be nothing?”

It didn’t, of course. We cancelled Italy along with a half dozen other trips I no longer remember now.

In some ways, I suppose it’s not that unusual – staying at home for a year. But I hadn’t done it in well over a decade. It’s part of how Rand and I engineered our lives: no kids, no pets, only a few neglected houseplants that I’m probably overwatering as of late, because, well – I’m around. Travel is simply what we do. Or rather, it’s what we did. At the apex of it, we’d spend a third of the year on the road.

I have been home for a year. But others in that world I used to inhabit have not. I see Instagram photos of someone proudly standing at a podium, receiving a travel writing award for glowing coverage of a state where the governor has adamantly refused to take any preventative measures to curb the spread of the virus (the governor is in the photo, maskless, applauding him). They never once mention that they’re in a Covid hotspot, with one of the highest death rates in the country.

In another travel community thread, a woman said that because she’s tested negative, she had every right to keep traveling. That she’s “not endangering anyone.” Someone tried to tell her that negative tests do not mean that one is immune. That you can still be a vector for spreading a disease. The woman doubled down. She’s not going to let Covid stop her, she said – as though she was somehow Joan of Arc facing the fire.

But there’s no nobility in it. As my friend Naomi notes, it comes down to the same thing as always – the concept encapsulated in that old Buzzfeed News Headline: “I Don’t Know How to Tell You That You Should Care About Other People.”

The proclamation that something is safe rattles her.

“Safe for who, exactly?” she asks.

I see snapshots from airports, heading to the few countries that will still let us in, or to Hawaii, because “People forget it’s part of America!” They ignore the fact that schools in Hawaii remain closed. That my friends with family on the islands are terrified for their well-being, because of the influx of tourists. Yes, there is a lot of shit that you can still do right now. You can still go to Disneyworld. You can eat indoors. You can attend a rally mashed up next to people who think that pandemics are fake and baby-eating lizard people are real. But that doesn’t mean that you should.

“These places are struggling,” I hear people say. “They need our money.”

I take a deep breath to stop the blood vessels in my eyes from bursting with rage.

Look, Hilton Hotels and United Airlines and the other titans of travel and hospitality? They are going to be just fine. They’re not going to collapse because you didn’t buy a $99/day super saver weekend getaway to Las Vegas. You are not going to single-handedly save the travel industry with your money. You might kill someone who’s working the front desk, though.

“BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SMALL INDIE HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS. I MUST HELP THEM.”

Buy a goddamn gift card. Or, hey, support your local restaurants with take-out, or order something from a local independent shop. They need you, too. Or if this is such a charitable effort on your part, why not just send them money? You can donate to organizations that are helping small businesses survive during this time (OH LOOK, THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE HAS A WHOLE GODDAMN LIST.)

*unclenches jaw and fists*

“BUT I HAVE DONE EVERYTHING RIGHT AND I SHOULD GET TO SAFELY HAVE A GETAWAY.”

Sigh. To refute this, I’m just going to borrow some phrases of rage from my friend Pam.

“To be clear, I understand there are safe scenarios — drive to a cabin! Bring all your groceries! Okay! And that the burden on close families is hard! Wear a mask, quarantine for two weeks upon arrival, do the same when you get home! THAT is doing everything right. Also, SHUT UP. Your performative “traveling safely” makes it look like it’s okay for any clown to “travel safely” and we live in a world of science deniers. SHUT UP. Take your trip and SHUT UP.”

Look, there’s a lot of privilege wrapped up in being a travel writer. Some of it is inherent. It requires a (semi-expendable) income, flexibility with work, valid passports, and bodies that are easily moved from one spot to another. But there’s an obligation in it, too. Travel is not a singular, solitary action. It is not something that exists in a vacuum. We interact with our environments, with the community and cultures that we find ourselves in. If we travel during a pandemic, we aren’t simply assuming risk for ourselves. We’re endangering everyone around us. We could spread a disease to fellow passengers, to airline and airport and hospitality employees. We could eventually be hospitalized in healthcare system that is unprepared for an influx of travelers, diverting resources from locals.

And if we are travel writers, we are leading by example. If we travel, we risk spreading the misconception that all travel is safe. As Pam notes, the world is full of science deniers. They do not see the differences between our actions and theirs. They do not understand the precautions that we’ve taken. They simply see it as an endorsement – from travel professionals – that it is okay to see the world right now.

And it’s not.

Look, this sucks. Being a travel writer who doesn’t travel messes with your sense of self. I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss my job.

I even miss the haze of landing in Europe first thing in the morning after a trans-Atlantic flight and having pancakes with this barely-conscious cutie.

But the thing, pandemics aren’t supposed to be fun. Global catastrophes aren’t supposed to be convenient, or enjoyable. They turn your world upside down, by design. It’s fucking awful. People are dying. I haven’t hugged my mom in a year. My nephew doesn’t know me. I am literally a stranger to him. My aunt and uncle are in their 80s, and my husband is terrified – absolutely terrified – that something will happen to them and we won’t get to say goodbye, in the same way we didn’t get to say goodbye to his grandmother.

There’s this longing for things to go back to how they were – I feel it so desperately, in my bones, while at the same realizing that it doesn’t get to happen for so many people. I think of everyone I know who has lost someone to Covid, and about how once vaccines are available and the world opens back up, their lives doesn’t go back to how they were. If you stretch an elastic band far enough, sometimes it stays like that, stretched out and brittle. Sometimes it just breaks.

I miss ferry rides. I miss the feel of smushing my face next to my beloved’s while we breath in sea air.

I want this to be over. And it fucking would be, if people just stayed at home. I’m asking you to do that, not just for yourself but for all of us. And if you decide to ignore not just your own well being, but everyone else’s … well, at least have the decency to be quiet about it.

I wonder what the universe will try to squeeze in at the end of this miserable year, if a massive fault line will be discovered right under my home, or a portal to hell found in my toilet. I am glued to my phone, to endless headlines of awful, and I read them aloud to my husband like the newsreel of some parallel universe where everything has gone to shit.

In the midst of all of this, one story has floated up to the top, a bit of inconsequential flotsam in a sea of miserable news, something for me to cling to in this storm of a year.

“Have you seen the Hilaria Baldwin story?” I ask him. I might, as these words escape my lips, be frothing at the mouth. My eyes are wide, and I’m feeling a sort of giddy frenzy at this, the crumbling of a curated social media facade. My husband, to his credit, does not look at my wild expression and dismiss me as a madwoman. He does not whisper “My love, you are shouting,” as he sometimes does because I often am. Instead, he looks at me with the patience that you would expect from someone who has made a relationship work for twenty years, where you pretend very much to care about the things your partner cares about, even if it’s only as long as it will take for them to explain that thing to you.

“Who is she?” he asks. This question is a gift.

Most people know by now, thanks to the osmosis of social media, but my husband did not, so I describe her as though I am unmasking a Shakespearean villain. I tell him how she is from Boston, how she put on a fake Spanish accent and professed to be from Mallorca. I describe the time she pretended to forget the English word for cucumber on television. How she gave her children Spanish names. She was a social media influencer/yoga instructor whose prided herself on authenticity, I say. I liken it to Marcus Brutus’ betrayal of Caesar.

My husband does not ask (for he is an obliging soul who has to cohabitate a space with his wife during a pandemic), but so many others have: why on earth do we care? Why am I, a reasonably intelligent person who didn’t even know that Alec Baldwin was remarried, so obsessed with this story when there are so many bigger things to worry about?

And perhaps that’s where the appeal lies – in the absurdity, the absolute madcap set-up, the fact that it has nothing to do with death or illness or pandemics. In a world that has become a dystopian apocalypse film, this storyline is a sit-com plot gone awry. When did Alec find out? Did she tell him at some point? Did she keep up the accent all the time? Like, all the time? What about her family? Was anyone, at any point, like, “Hey, Hillary, you know we’re from Massachusetts, right?”

Was there an evening where she was double-booked as both Hilaria and Hillary, and she had to scamper from one event to the other?

I NEED TO KNOW.

I mean, look: it’s been a rough goddamn year. So many of us are barely holding it together. But as we change from our day pajamas to our night pajamas, brushing crumbs from our breasts as we silently judges ourselves for being shadows of who we once were, we can find comfort in this: we never spent a decade of our life creating an elaborate, culturally-appropriating alter-ego which then became our undoing.

I am wearing pajamas. It is after noon. Hilaria Baldwin’s story is fading from the headlines, as stories do – I once again find myself reading about Americans starving and dying and the government failing to pass stimulus packages. But in this year of awfulness, watching her story play out like a pop culture Greek tragedy has been a welcome distraction. One I want to hold on to for just a little while longer.

But now the world isn’t normal, and I don’t know if that helps with grief or not.

Rand’s grandmother died two weeks ago. I think it was two weeks ago. It might have been three weeks ago, or maybe yesterday, or last month. Time is infinitely malleable when your heart hurts and you aren’t allowed to go anywhere. It’s always Tuesday, and it’s always 3pm, and then it’s midnight, and we aren’t sleeping, and how has another week passed, and my god, it’s already almost November but simultaneously still March.

I haven’t written about Rand’s grandmother because … well, it feels like starting another fire when there’s already a blaze I can’t control. I was just barely dealing with everything, just like everyone else. There’s no need to add to the pyre.

Besides, it’s hard to know where to place this grief. She wasn’t my grandmother. She wasn’t even remotely like my grandmother, who was utterly domestic and spent her life in the kitchen, because her love language was feeding people. Rand’s grandmother went to Broadway shows and museums and the running gag about what she made for dinner was “reservations.”

Honestly, what an absolute legend.

And while my grandmother adored me to a degree that became part of family lore, Rand’s grandmother and I had a more complicated relationship. His grandmother always let me know what she thought of me. It was not always good. But sometimes it was. Either way, I knew where I stood – there was no ambiguity with her, ever. She was tough and direct and her eyes lit up when she was happy, which was every single time she saw Rand, and sometimes when she saw me, too.

She didn’t die of Covid, but the pandemic darkened her final months – we couldn’t see her, and had to wave at her through a window. As she neared the end of her life, we were allowed in-person visits. The last time I saw her, she wasn’t able to say or even move all that much, but she pulled me down to her and kissed me, which she wasn’t supposed to do.

Our relationship didn’t simply happen. It was earned. She made me realize how valuable something is when you have to work so hard for it. I spent half my life trying to make her proud. And now that she’s gone, there’s this weird hollow spot in my chest and I honestly don’t know what to do. I can’t really write or function all that well lately (I can eat just fine, thank you very much.) But mostly, I just keep looking around and asking, “Now, what?”

Really. Now, what?

There was no funeral. The memorial was over Zoom, which, *gestures broadly* is what it is. It’s not what I wanted for her, or what she deserved. She deserved scores of people wearing tasteful black clothing and giving emotional (but not too emotional) speeches that were entirely absent of sarcasm. I’ve almost come to terms with the fact that the last year has been about not being able to celebrate the good times, or to live life the way we’d like … but to not be able to even grieve or die in the ways in which we want to … that feels like a particular type of cruelty.

I guess there’s solace in knowing that when I curl up and tell people that I just have had enough, they all seem to understand. That if I stand on a corner in my neighborhood and break down in tears, and anyone spots my sobs from behind my glasses and mask, they simply nod. Because the one thing we all seem to understand right now is what it means to miss people, and the way the things used to be. I’m mostly just trying to get through, in whatever way I can. I still hear her voice, clear as a bell, asking me what I’ve done to my hair, and wondering when, exactly, I’m going to be done with my next book.

The answer is always the same. “I don’t know. But I hope you like it.”

Death and the post office.

That took me slightly by surprise, even in a year where nothing has been what I’d imagined. I didn’t think we’d be arguing whether or not we, as a country, should be able to send and receive mail. Then again, I didn’t think we’d be debating on whether germ theory is real or not, either.

A few people have told me that those of us defending the United States Postal Service don’t care about the institution, but I have always regarded it with a level of fondness that one does not normally attribute to governmental institutions. It’s like finding yourself waxing poetic about the passport office or the IRS. They shouldn’t elicit an emotion other than a bit of ennui, perhaps a cold feeling of dread.

But the United States Post Office is the reason I knew my father.

To understand the role it played in our relationship, you’d have to understand a few things about my father, and me. We never lived together. I never once shared an address with him, or even a home continent. My father lived in Germany for my entire life, and I lived in America. He never had an email address, even after they became popular. He was not a huge fan of phone conversations, either.

The main way in which my father and I communicated was through letters. He would write me, regularly, beginning when I was so young that my mother had to read them to me, until a few years before his death. Thick envelopes would arrive, and he’d number the pages in order to keep them straight.

My father did not alter his message for his audience. As a very small child, I received sheet after sheet written in cursive that I could not yet decipher. Complaints about his work, detailed accounts of the weather in Munich, mentions of friends of his that he’d known for decades who I had never met. He signed every letter the same way.

“Your father, Paul.”

He was generally annoyed with everyone, mostly wanting to be left alone. Letters were the only way anyone could really be with him without having to actually spend time with him – which is how he preferred things.

I tried to test the waters, calling him “Daddy” once or twice, as I’d seen my peers do with their own fathers, but when I said it, it read as sarcastic. My father was not a sentimental person. He was not warm. He did not enjoy children. When I was young, I resented his coldness, and seldom wrote. He was not happy about this. (He let me know via letter.)

I saw my father once between the ages of ten and fifteen. Again when I was 16, once more when I was 19. But his letters arrived monthly. He was retired military, but maintained a post office box at the base, which meant I didn’t need to pay international postage rates. It cost as much to reach my father as it did to reach someone in the next county. This always baffled me as a child. It took me a long time to realize it was a service for U.S. military personnel, but also, that the post office was a governmental institution, not a business. It existed not to make money. It existed because we needed it to exist.

He rarely sent photos, though I occasionally did, especially as I entered my high school years. I’d splurge for double-prints, and send a few to him.

“This is what I look like now,” I’d write.

Years passed. The pile of letters from my father grew larger. I sorted them into neat boxes, arranged by date. I understood that he would not change. He would not be warmer. He would not kiss me or hug me. He would not sign his missives “Love, Dad.” But there was an immutable consistency in his letters. They arrived like clockwork, describing the weather in Munich in 1989, in 1995, in 2002. He sent my mother child support, sent me checks to cover tuition. He was as reliable as the mail.

Sometimes, my father would send me stamps, and I would marvel at the tiny little images from far off places. It was strangely recursive, self-referential, stamps inside a letter. I wasn’t even sure if I liked collecting them; they were so brittle, best left alone. Now, four years after his death, I have a box of them. I can’t look at them without breaking down.

I could not go to my father’s funeral. It was the week of Christmas in rural Bavaria. My stepmother gave us five days notice. By then he had already been cremated. I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye, because that sort of ceremony is reserved for people who do not live on separate continents from their fathers. Those are the sorts of things that you cannot say in letters.

A return trip ticket with less than a weeks notice would cost me ten thousand dollars. I asked my stepmother if it was possible to move the funeral. She doesn’t speak English, so her daughter yelled at me on her behalf via Facebook Messenger. The date would not be moved.

I didn’t go.

By the time I was able to make it out to Germany, after the holidays, my stepmother had cleaned out my father’s possessions. His workshop was empty, his model planes were gone. She gave me a box of old photos. I left cradling them to my chest. None of the pictures I’d sent him over the years were inside. I don’t know what happened to the letters I wrote him.

This is the part where, as a good essayist, I tell you that it is okay. That I have every letter that my father ever wrote me. That I look at them and trace our relationship back to before I can remember.

Instead I will tell you the truth: that I tried retrieving those letters from my mother’s house, but she told me that she had moved them and didn’t know where they were. Two weeks later, a kitchen fire tore through my mother’s home. No one was hurt, but my letters were gone. My father was again reduced to ashes.

Losing someone, especially someone you could never quite get a grasp on in the first place, is a strange thing. You find yourself crying at the oddest moments, over the strangest things. I hold on to a scrap of paper with my father’s handwriting on it. I cradle a toy car, pilfered from his house, on days when I need to feel something concrete. Not something warm or affectionate, because that is not who he was, but something meticulous and precise, a tiny little metal Mercedes that feels heavy in my hand.

When I told my father I loved him, he would always respond “Fine,” his annoyance stretching out the syllables.

I still send letters when I can. I write thank you notes on occasion. I mail bills that could just as easily have been paid online, because I like placing the stamp in the corner of the envelope. I like doing things that remind me of my father.

I didn’t think I’d have to work so hard to remember him. I had so much documentation of our relationship, tucked into envelope after envelope. I try to remember the loops of his handwriting, how he wrote his name. I wonder what the weather is like in Munich. I think of the Post Office, and I find myself crying, because it is one more thing that I didn’t think I would lose.

Last week, my kitchen sink collapsed. It fell from the bolts that held it, as though in protest, as though it, too, had had enough of the endless dishes and cooking. I managed to catch the edge of it, sharp even through my yellow latex gloves, and held it up with my fingers and the edges of my knees while I screamed for my husband, who did not hear me. I eventually managed to wedge a stool underneath and emailed our handyman, asking if he was comfortable working during this time. I explained to him that Rand and I had been social distancing for three months.

“I’ll be by tomorrow,” he said. I made sure I was out of the house when he said he’d arrive, but he’d texted me to say that he was delayed. I went home, and made myself a bowl of cereal, ready to dart out again before his new arrival time, but he got to the house earlier than he’d said. He walked through the door (I told him that it would be unlocked since I planned on being out), greeted me cheerfully and walked passed me into my kitchen.

He was not wearing a mask, and did not offer to put one on.

I haven’t stepped foot inside a grocery store since March. I’ve been to the pharmacy twice since lock-down started, to pick up my prescriptions. And so when our handyman walked into my home without making this one simple precautionary measure, I was stunned.

When he started to make idle chit-chat, I thought I was losing my mind.

“Are you two traveling?” he asked, knowing that we were often on the road.

“What? No. No, of course not. We’re not going anywhere.” I said, and he laughed. Our trips have been cancelled. International travel isn’t even possible during this time, and only necessary travel has been allowed by the governor. Passports aren’t even being renewed right now, and my husband’s expires at the end of the year, something which has been causing us both a measure of anxiety (“Jews don’t like it when we don’t have active passports,” Rand jokes.)

Seeing him without a mask, at ease, I assumed that he must have been socially isolating as well. That he and his family were on lockdown. Instead, he told me how he hadn’t stopped working, how he was still going to job sites and Home Depot, same as always. As he spoke, I thought of a video I saw of how breath travels, imagined tiny droplets spreading out of his mouth and across my kitchen. I tried to remember where my own mask was. It was next to the door. Because I hadn’t planned on being home when he got here.

I backed into the other room, putting a wall between us, and he laughed.

Me, literally every time I go out now.

He told me how he’d just flown back from Texas yesterday (“I was visiting my mom.”) and how the flight attendant was “a black lady who wasn’t having anything to do with masks, either.” I remember reading that you shouldn’t include someone’s race or ethnicity in a story unless it’s pertinent to the plot. I wondered why he felt necessary to include that detail, if her resistance to wearing a mask was his watered down version of “I have a black friend.” I found myself thinking about the disproportionate number of people of color who die from this illness.

When I told him that my mom’s country of Italy has been decimated by Coronavirus, he said, “Well, don’t they have a large Chinese population?”

“Yes,” I said, confused. And? He didn’t reply, and it hits me, slower than it should. The President has been calling coronavirus the “Chinese virus”, an expression that stokes xenophobia and implies, somehow, that your whiteness can protect you from the disease. I wondered how many microaggressions I’d missed from our handyman over the years, how many things I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t needed to notice – because my own whiteness had allowed me to ignore them right up until my own well-being was at stake.

Privilege is a hell of a drug, I’ll you that much. Unsure of what to do, I walked out of the room, went upstairs and cried.

He shouted at me from the bottom of the stairs, that the sink wasn’t quite done – but he fixed it enough to last for the time being, and said I could call him again to finish the job when I wasn’t “too afraid to have people in the house.” I could hear his eyes rolling from the other room. I wanted to yell at him. I should have yelled at him. I should have screamed at him that Chinese people aren’t more likely to get Coronavirus than anyone else. That masks work. That he should have fucking told me before he barged into my house without one. That when I said we’d been socially isolating, I was trying to reassure him that my home was safe, but also stating my values: I believe in science.

And if he didn’t, he had an obligation to tell me that instead of just walking in.

Instead, I stammered. I broke down into tears.

The entire time, I’d been so concerned about his own comfort, but he hadn’t once worried about mine. I asked if he’d be comfortable coming to my house during a pandemic, assuming he was just as concerned about it as I was. I’d made plans to leave the house entirely. I’d sanitized all the surfaces he was going to come in contact with. He didn’t even send me a text telling me to leave the house because he couldn’t be bothered with a mask.

After he left, I spent three hours cleaning my kitchen, wiping down cabinets and handles with bleach, scrubbing the floors. Lady MacBeth if she listened to NPR so she could pretend she was woke, but was too afraid to speak up when it actually came down to it. Our cutlery drawer was left slightly ajar, and that was enough for me to empty the contents of it into the dishwasher. I even threw out the dishwashing gloves that were sitting out when he arrived. I imagined him laughing at me. I didn’t care. I kept cleaning.

The dishes I did by hand.

Rand tells me that the CDC says it’s almost impossible to catch Coronavirus from surfaces. I nod. It’s not about that.

I’m so angry at this man who walked into our home. I’m so angry with myself. I wonder why I didn’t ask him to leave immediately. I wonder why I didn’t scream at him.

“He’s someone who always seemed to care about other people’s safety,” Rand said, noting all the precautions he’d taken with his work in the past. “It’s so disappointing that he wouldn’t care in this instance.”

But the President’s refusal to wear a mask has turned yet another public health issue into a political one. People try entering stores without them, claiming that masks are an infringement of their freedoms. I watch viral videos of people coughing on essential workers when they are refused admission, and feel my blood pressure rise.

If 80% of people wore masks, we could essentially eliminate the spread of Coronavirus.

Some are going to argue that masks don’t keep you safe – and the thing is, they’re right. They don’t. Masks keep other people safe. They’re the ultimate act of empathy. They’re a kindness we do for others – like coughing into our elbows or not tweeting out movie spoilers even weeks after something’s been released. We do it because it makes the world a better place.

Refusing to wear a mask means that your own convenience is more important than anyone else’s life. And refusing to take a virus seriously because you think the only people who are dying are ones who don’t look like you …  well, that means you are a bigoted asshole.

I feel like this should be easy. Wear a mask. Don’t be racist. In short: care about other people.

After he leaves, I scrub my floors and counters with bleach until my nostrils burn. I realize I’m not just angry that I let him into my house without a mask. I’m angry that I let him into my house at all.

But that’s not how time is supposed to work in the present. In the present, days are distinct units of time, separated by the bold lines in our calendars, each one carrying a different obligation. There are weekdays and weekends, there are classes on some days, and workouts on others, a dinner with friends on a Thursday or a birthday party on a weekend that you don’t really want to go (but if you hadn’t been invited, you’d have been a little offended).

When the world is normal, each day is different, even if subtly so. But the world isn’t normal, and so the days run together, and I wake up wondering if anything will make this particular one stand out. If I’ll do something today – anything at all – or if I won’t.

And a lot of the time the answer is: I won’t.

This was taken at, like, 3 pm. I am in my pjs.

I have watched people doing things. From the comfort of my home office, I have absorbed their heartfelt, painstaking, beautiful work. I marvel at their sourdough bread loaves (so many loaves!) and their elaborate meals. I wonder if I should make a sourdough starter? It seems like the thing to do. Feeding something in my home, making it come alive. The company sounds nice. I don’t do it. There is yeast in my fridge, because of course there is. I live in the northwest. I’ve been prepping for an earthquake for the last decade and a half. Of course I have yeast, and flour, and sugar and batteries. My pantry is full. I even managed to snag a grocery delivery slot for myself this weekend.

Look how well I’m doing. Healthy and whole and never leaving my house. Look, look, look.

One day I give my husband an excellent haircut and myself a mediocre one, and I post the photos online, because I need people to see. I want them to comment on the excellent job I did, but I also want them to know that I did something. Because so much of my day is spent not doing anything. So much of my day is spent simply trying to breathe while watching the world fall apart.

I’m fine. I’m fine. By some grace of circumstance and science, my family is okay. I get angry at myself for being so wrecked by everything, for coming unspooled like a ball of yarn rolling down a hill because look, I’m whole and okay and so are my loved ones, and so few people can say that.

I bet some of you have done that to yourselves, too.

But this is a reminder that you are allowed to grieve, even if you are fine. You are allowed to grieve and be angry and become undone because you know that the world isn’t fine. You aren’t a sociopath. You see people being buried in mass graves in New York, and a part of you withers. You see that Florida won’t shut its beaches and you want to throw something, because you know it just means more. of. this. The President withholds medical equipment to punish governors who won’t kiss his ring and you want to scream to the heavens because you feel powerless and you can’t even leave your house. You aren’t a sociopath. These things bother you, even as you sit comfortably on your couch.

The weight of all of this sits on your chest and limbs and makes it hard to move or breathe or even open your eyes. And yet somehow, you still feel the pressure to make the days distinct. To have them make sense. To create, and put things out in the world. That is what other people are doing. Bu some days, you just can’t. You can’t create. You can’t make a sourdough starter. You can barely watch television, because the sight of characters, touching one another, breathing and kissing and laughing and yelling out in a world less broken than this one is just too much.

And maybe it’s okay if you can’t right now. Maybe treading water is enough. People are making beautiful things. My neighbor weeds her perfect garden. Young actors make clever videos from their homes. My husband gets dressed and does his perfect hair (you’re welcome) and dutifully works (he is working. All the time. He is on podcasts and on webinars and making videos and accidentally bombing Instagram with his perfect, perfect abs). This is how they cope.

I laud them for it.

But for some of us, maybe it is enough just to keep our heads above water. It’s okay if you can’t right now. It’s okay if you can’t write now. Or cook. Or paint. Or make sourdough bread. It is enough that you are here, breathing. It is enough that your heart is beating, over and over and over again, refusing to stop, in this storm of a world, on this day that has blended in with all the rest. And tomorrow – which may be a Saturday or a Wednesday, and I can tell you from the bottom of my soul, it does not matter, either way – your heart and lungs will endeavor to do it again. And that is enough right now.

I haven’t left the house in several days. I was taking walks around my neighborhood, dutifully watching my heart rate go up, lauding myself for being so responsible, even in these strange times, but I stopped. My enthusiasm for my own-well being waned. And besides, staying at home, staring blankly at my TV is good for my own well-being, I’m told. It’s good for everyone’s well-being. So I stopped walking. I was literally going nowhere, anyway – just circling the block until I started to memorize houses, like a conspicuous burglar. I had been occasionally going to the grocery store, looking forward the to the errand with a weird sort of zeal usually found in dogs about to go on walks, but that started to prove too stressful. Other shoppers seem unwilling to observe the 19-foot cone of distance I was comfortable with. One guy cut in line in front of me because I’d left too much space between myself and the shopper ahead of me. I pointed this out to him. He didn’t care and held firm to his spot.

“I was here first,” he said.

He wasn’t.

I wanted to scream at him. Everywhere I went, it felt like the air was thick and staticky with someone about to snap. Why couldn’t that someone be me?

I’d come home in a cold sweat, would frantically wipe down all of my groceries, stopping short of washing my vegetables with soap (that was a bridge too far – and wholly unnecessary, as it turns out). But the entire exercise has proven too stressful, so instead I’ve opted to just stay inside. I am all caught up on laundry. I am finally getting around to reading that book I said I was going to read. Rand and I cook, or we order take-out. Sometimes, if I ignore the details (the wiping down of the to-go containers, the never-ending stream of terrible news on my phone) it almost feels normal.

“It’s fine if I stay in the house,” Rand told me. “It’s when I go outside that everything feels apocalyptic.”

He has started rewatching Community. I remember him loving it the first time around. I watched a couple episodes with him, feeling nostalgic for an epoch that seemed to have just happened.

I started sobbing at a character’s final farewell, and Rand looked at me in a mix of confusion and disbelief. I’d seen the episode before. It’s not like any of it was a surprise.

“You’re upset because Donald Glover is leaving?” he said, incredulously. “He goes on to do great stuff.” (He does.)

“No,” I told him through gulps of air. “But I miss the time when this show made sense. I miss Obama. I miss the world when it wasn’t broken.”

And he hugged me and I cried and said something about missing haircuts and hugging people and grocery stores. I miss people not dying by the thousands. I miss a lot of fucking things, big and small, insignificant and not. I miss feeling hopeful. I don’t fucking remember the last time I felt that way, but I’m certain it was sometime during the course of this fucking TV show, a show which felt absurdly dated because it showed people going outside and touching one another. 

The thing is, if you don’t try to do any of those things, you almost feel normal. It’s like  – forgive me, I’ve been stuck inside for only a few fucking weeks but here I am quoting Anna Karenina, my god – it’s like when Tolstoy wrote how someone can sit still for a huge stretch of time without any problem at all, but if you tell them that they have to stay still, they won’t be able to do it. I’m sure before all of this there were plenty of days when I didn’t see my friends or hug anyone but my husband or go outside. But now that I can’t? God. Now that I can’t – it’s all I think about. And maybe that’s why it’s easier to stay indoors – to avoid the grocery store altogether.

A friend of mine noted that he changed from his day pajamas to his night pajamas and I laughed, having done the same thing. Another noted that she had no idea – like, not even a vague inkling – of what day it was.

“Yes, yes,” I thought, feeling a sort of pride that I knew so well what they were talking about. I remember what my friend Mindy told me back when I had my brain surgery, something that comes to mind again and again:

“One day, all of this will just be a weird memory.”

Right. Right. The present eventually fades. It does. Heartache goes away. The world feels broken right now, none of it makes sense, and eventually this becomes a weird point in the past. We’ll go out. We’ll go to restaurants again. And theaters. We’ll see friends. We’ll hug one another.

Remember that time we all had to stay indoors and everything was broken?

Yes, yes. I remember. That sucked. Anyway, we’d better get our food order in, or we’ll miss the movie.

I live in Seattle, the epicenter of the U.S. Coronavirus outbreak. My town has, over the last week, folded in on itself, a slow-motion capture of an amoeba being poked, only with more panicked trips to Costco (I’m bad at analogies.)

Locally, Seattle Public Schools have been canceled for the next two weeks. Big employers are telling people to work from home. Restaurants are closing by the dozens – and Asian restaurants in particular are being brutally hit (while nationally, hate crimes against Asian Americans are being reported). The governor has called for a cancellation of gatherings of more than 250 people. We can’t seem to get testing kits for the virus, because that would mean knowing just how widespread this all is (the Seattle doctor who first discovered the outbreak in the area was told by the CDC to cease and desist her testing).

Stores are selling out of toilet paper and disinfectant and limiting how much people can buy.

The disinfecting cleaner aisle.

The toilet paper aisle.

Yesterday, the President instituted a ban on travel to Europe (with exemptions to the countries where he has golf courses). Rand and I postponed trips to Italy, the U.K., and Minneapolis, as a bunch of conferences have been canceled.

And I am sitting in my office, typing at a keyboard that I have just wiped down with a disinfecting cloth. Everything in my office has been disinfected. The keyboard, the mouse, the monitor, the stretch of desk underneath it. I didn’t stop there. I ran Lysol wipes over light switches and door knobs and banisters yesterday, I wiped down faucets and the edges of sinks and random stretches of wall that seemed to incur more contact with humans. While others stocked up on bleach and soap and toilet paper, I took stock of what I already had and shrugged. I grabbed another bottle of Clorox, just in case. I already have so many spray bottles of bleach throughout the house. So many rags and sponges and anti-bacterial wipes.

Being a germaphobe during an epidemic is a strange thing, because it’s like you’ve been training for it your entire life.

I am tempted to judge people frantically stockpiling items in some vain attempt to protect themselves from invisible harm, but let’s be real: that’s how I live my life. My pantry is full. I buy lots of hand soap. I have so, so, so many rolls of paper towels. Somehow, the accumulation of all of these things in my home makes me feel safe. It makes me think I’m ready for anything, even when I’m not. It gives me some semblance of control over the things I cannot control.

“We have fifty rolls of toilet paper,” I told Rand.

“Oh, god, why did you buy fifty rolls of toilet paper?”

“I didn’t. That’s just how many we had.”

“Oh.”

“Should I get more?”

“… no.”

A friend once used a dish towel to wipe something off of my floor, and I nearly threw him out of my house. (They aren’t called floor towels.)

Last weekend I coughed in public. As people at the end of an aisle scattered, I wanted to yell at them: Now you know. Now you know what’s it like to be me all the time. Convinced, at any given moment bacteria will jump from the ether on to you. When I was 11, I washed my hands constantly, because I was certain that I was going to get cholera. Cholera. (Which, honestly, it was Florida, so perhaps it was a fair enough concern. But what 11-year-old even knows what cholera is?) After I used the bathroom, I’d splash my hands with rubbing alcohol.

I’ve always been ahead of the curve.

Empty shelves where hand soap usually is.

I wipe down my tray table and airplane seat with a disinfecting wipe every time I fly. I run it over the surfaces we might touch, and afterwards, I use Purell on my hands. I see other travelers watching me. I remember one woman starting at me and then giving her husband a look – an eyebrows raised, “that woman is crazy” look. I wonder how much toilet paper she’s purchased in the last few days. I wonder if she’d think I was crazy now.

When I got a brain tumor in 2012, I dismissed it immediately, because it was beyond the realm of things I could have prepared for with extra grocery trips and Clorox. My family of hypochondriacs went into a panic, while I blithely asked my doctor what the odds were that my tumor was a LEGO I’d shoved up my nose as a child. (“It is definitely not that,” he said, either the master of the deadpan, or refusing to indulge my joke.) It wasn’t until weeks or months or years later that I realized that perhaps it was a big deal. That brain surgery is a whole to-do. But it was beyond my scope of control so … *shrugs*

People always worry that their headaches are actually brain tumors. I was convinced my brain tumor was actually just a headache.

My mother came to take care of me in the aftermath of my surgery, keeping an eye on me while Rand was at work. She used my Swiffer to clean my floors but did so without attaching a cleaning pad. She just scraped the plastic holder along the floor, while I sat, staples in my head, thinking, “That is not how you clean,” but being unable to articulate the thought. Being unable to articulate any thought, really. It was the lack of control that got me, of course. God, I couldn’t even clean my house the way I wanted. Just imagine.

I text my cousins in Italy and make sure that everyone is okay. That my 94-year-old great-aunt continues to be fine. In Seattle,  I open up my cabinet and I stare at all of the cleaning supplies, at the piles of canned goods, at the rolls and rolls of paper towels and toilet paper. At things that were all here long before news of this epidemic broke.

“I think I’m getting sick,” my friends say, worried.

“I know,” I tell them. God, how I know.

I’m angry that he wasn’t found guilty on all the charges.

And at the same time, I can’t believe he was found guilty at all.

As I try to process that news I find myself writing this post, which, as ridiculous as it may sound, is about meatballs. Jesus H. Christ. Meatballs. I don’t know what to do when reality borders parody. I suppose we just lean into it.

Last week, Mike Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York currently seeking the Democratic nomination for President, took part in his first televised debate. The other candidates, but mostly Elizabeth Warren, Valkyrie warrior and Themysciran Queen, brought up his racist Stop-and-Frisk policy (which actually fucking lowered the graduation rates of black high schoolers where it was enacted. IT LOWERED GRADUATION RATES.), his history of calling women horrific names (like “horse-faced lesbians”), and the NDAs he made women sign in order to quash allegations of sexual harassment. None of this has stopped Bloomberg from running for office. None of it has kept him from the debate stage.

It feels like a weird rerun. The competent woman going after the racist, sexist billionaire, those of us cheering her on wondering if it’ll amount to anything, and fearing that once again, it won’t.

And once again, I find myself making a recipe. Because hours before that debate, Mike Bloomberg’s team – who have spent more than $400 million on campaign ads (because in America wealth doesn’t simply buy you healthcare and criminal immunity) but also political office – released a recipe for meatballs.

Meatballs.

Cool. No one has learned anything.

This recipe looks like trash.

I’m obviously going to make it.

Let’s ignore the image of the meatballs, on which someone has superimposed Bloomberg’s face, staring at us, his eyes seemingly screaming, “EAT ME.” Let us ignore the fact that the balls are doused in a red sauce, which is entirely absent from the recipe itself. Let’s ignore the fact that, according to one of his employees, Bloomberg once said “I’d like to do that piece of meat” when referring to a woman in his office.

We’re going to pretend these things are normal behavior from a man running for President, because, hell, they sort of are.

And now this man, who is literally a BILLIONAIRE, had his presidential campaign team release a recipe that doesn’t work, presumably to illustrate just how immune he is to the consequences of his actions, big or small.

The second ingredient listed is ground veal. Because that’s the sort of humane recipe component that you’d expect from a man who doesn’t think twice about telling the women in his sales department to blow a male employee as a wedding gift.

Do you know what normal, everyday grocery stores don’t carry? Ground fucking veal. Rand and I went to four different grocery stores looking for ground up baby cows that probably died of loneliness and came up empty. And you know what? Veal is too fucking lean for meatballs, anyway. But of course I still looked.

We went down the ingredient list. The recipe calls for 2 cups of stale Italian bread, crumbled, but the only bread I had was a thing beyond stale. It was so old that we should have rightfully thrown it away, but there’s no such thing as too old when you’re a man running for the office of President.

Rand grated it, and it was so brittle that it flew everywhere, but hey, that’s fine! Make a mess! Maybe someone else will clean it up. (As soon as Stop-and-Frisk ended under Mayor de Blasio, crime rates fell. It’s almost like the policy did the opposite thing it was supposed to do.)

The recipe says to combine the meats in a large bowl, then add garlic, eggs, cheese, parsley, an unspecified amount of salt and pepper, and … provolone and pepperoni?

Get your friend to help. Pay her for her work in meatballs as a metaphor for the under-compensation of women everywhere.

Wait, what?

Those two things weren’t on the ingredient list. It’s like the top half of the recipe was forced to sign an NDA where it couldn’t mention the provolone and the pepperoni, and then the instructions just blurted them out.

And at that point, dear readers, I realized how fucking tired I was. Tired of listening to rich, powerful men tell me how things are, when I know they’re wrong. And Bloomberg’s recipe is so very wrong that it doesn’t even make sense. A lot of the time, we just have to go along with it, because when everyone keeps legitimizing someone, when everyone keeps insisting that this person obviously knows what they’re doing, you start to think that maybe you’re the one who doesn’t know how to make meatballs, even though you’ve known since you were small, since before you knew the English word for meatballs.

Oh my god, even these analogies are stupid. I hate all of this. I’m not going to complain about the unexpected glory of my career, but what does it say about the world that I can make a name for myself critiquing the recipes of sexual harassing dipshits? THIS SHOULD NOT BE ANYONE’S JOB. THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS. But here I am, making another fucking shit recipe because Mike Bloomberg has enough money to buy a metric ton of memes and commercials that play every 45 seconds in the hopes we’ll forget that he’s a racist sexist asshole.

“Hand me an onion,” I told my husband.

“Is there an onion in the recipe?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I asked for more garlic. Rand suggested we throw in another egg, so we did. And more parsley. And a splash of milk.

Rand threw salt in – grains falling from his fingers like sand. He knew exactly how much to add. There are no shortcuts to that – it’s something that comes from experience, from making a recipe so many times you don’t even think twice about something as critical as salt.

And god, it’s so nice to know I can trust him with things like that. Things that seem small but are so, so important.

“This is going to be the best thing to come out of Bloomberg’s candidacy,” he said, smiling.

He made a red sauce – the one absent from the recipe – slow-cooking an entire half onion and whole cloves of garlic in tomato sauce until they fell apart. He broiled the meatballs instead of baking them, so the tops got crisp and brown,  and he swept up the crumbs from the bread he’d grated. I thought about what it means to have a partner who make things easier. Who cooks for you and runs to the grocery store when you are too tired and who cleans up the kitchen and reminds you, time and again, that everything he has is yours, too.

My mother ate dinner with us. When we told her what recipe we’d started with, she almost walked away from the table, hands fluttering up, the sort of indignation that can only happen if your mother is Italian and she’s been offended both culinarily and politically.

“It’s okay,” I said, handing her a plate. “We didn’t follow the recipe.”

Sometimes, you just can’t.

Big thanks to our friend B for taking many of the pictures in this post. <3

I nodded, but had been planning a gift for him anyway – something unexpected and fun, but not so expensive or over-the-top that I couldn’t squeeze something else in should he suddenly decide (as he occasionally did) that there was something he wanted. Predictably, a few days before his birthday, he excitedly told me he’d figured out what I could get him for a present.

“For my fortieth birthday,” he said, with a slight dramatic pause, “I would like you to give away forty things.”

I grabbed my chest like someone in a Spaghetti Western who’d just been shot. I insisted that this was not how things worked. Birthdays presents cannot be negative space. They cannot be the absence of something but the presence of it. They are about frivolity and the unexpected.

“I want you to give away forty things,” he said again. “That is what I want for my birthday.”

My husband would describe himself as a minimalist. I would describe him as a heartless sociopath when it comes to material possessions. I’ve seen him open up cards from his 90-something year old grandparents, smile affectionately as he reads the contents, and then gently fold the letter up and put it in the recycling bin.

“You can’t keep everything,” he tells me often.

“Yes,” I reply. “But surely you can keep some things.”

Before I go any further, let me absolve myself of the inherent accusations of hoarding that will necessarily accompany a request such as his: I genuinely and truly don’t think I have that much stuff. I realize that most hoarders say this, but IT. IS. TRUE. I’m constantly running out of clean underwear, I tell him, which I feel like is a testament to the fact that I don’t have enough pairs.

Still, I will concede: I am far from a minimalist. My adolescent and teen years occurred in the 90s, a decade during which young people were accumulating worthless items with the enthusiasm of squirrels stowing away nuts for the upcoming winter. “Come over and see my sticker/pencil/troll doll collection” young people would say to each other, and then we would silently judge one another on the quality and neatness of entirely worthless caches. Social hierarchies were established on who had amassed the heftiest pile of Lisa Frank accouterments.

“How do you expect me to have friends when my ceramic owl collection is just pitiful?” I tell Rand tearfully. He stares at me for a long time without speaking.

“Look,” I whisper to my husband as I throw things into the trash. “Look how I purge.”

“Those things are garbage,” he tells me. “Throwing away garbage is not something to be lauded. It is what you are supposed to do with garbage.”

His request is not unreasonable. Our home is a sprawling thing. Finding 40 items to give away should be easy, but the problem is that I have just purged well more than that recently. I have tossed things from my closet, I have cleaned out my jewelry drawers, I have gone through those boxes in the basement that have remained unopened since we moved. But these things can’t count. They wouldn’t be a birthday present if they did.

And so I start again. This time with objects that I want to keep, but that Rand hates.

I have, in the last few  years, developed the delightful hobby of tormenting my husband with photos of objects from the Goodwill, threatening to buy them. Occasionally, but not always, I do – (the inconsistency, I’ve found, creates more anxiety). But sometimes just the threat of buying something is torment enough.

I left the giant mug and demon painting, but bought the chip bowl shaped like a hat. Whenever I used it, Rand would groan like a old door.

“Please,” he said, “Get rid of that thing.”

For his birthday, I finally agree to.

“It should count as more than one thing,” I tell him as I pull it out of the cabinet.

“It counts as one,” he replies. I have married a monster.

“Do shoes count as two distinct objects?” I ask. They do not.

I hold up a free promotional key chain and ask if it qualifies. Rand stares at me blankly. That is trash, he tells me. Why do I even have that? I sigh.

My memory is a vast thing. This should make things easier to throw things out, shouldn’t it? I should retain stories and not things. Instead, objects serve as a sort of external hard drive – I can’t throw them out without recalling why I’ve kept them for this long. I don’t know how other people’s memories work – but fittingly for a child raised on television, mine plays out like a clip show. Here are the earrings I was wearing on the night Rand proposed. The watch he gave me for Christmas, 2001. The program from the show we saw when he took me to New York for the first time. If I close my eyes, I can revisit those moments again and again. If throw those items out, does the memory go with them?

I keep these things, of course. Better not to risk it.

I think about how quickly my stepmother cleaned out my father’s workshop after he died. I think about the desk where he spent so much time and how bare it looked afterwards. I wonder what happened to his things. I think about the fire that tore through my mother’s home, burning all the letters he sent me. I want to tell Rand I’ve given away more than forty things in recent years, but that would defeat the purpose of the gift. Instead, I place the chip bowl into the giveaway pile, along with precisely 39 other items. My husband beams at me, and I stare at his face, trying to remember every detail.