Green field

The panic is nonverbal. So is the relief. It happens so fast: the conflict and the resolution. One minute I am relishing my makeshift movie theater, ready to ride out a covid moment, and the next I cannot bear to watch another line of credits. I think I will be well in three day’s time. But with each successive day, I hit my energy wall by the afternoon. That’s when the panic sets in. And it matters that it’s nonverbal because I find that for the entire week, I cannot write. I cannot move beyond the cloud of fatigue. Then when I do, I am stuck waiting for normality, for the second line in the test to go away. 

Writing is where I escape when all the comforts of my normal routine are nicely in place. But in this covid moment, I realize I’ve fallen a few steps down Maslov’s pyramid. And I am waiting to recover these pieces of normal, and we have all gone through this together once, so we know what that means. 

To have ricocheted back into covid land. Something about it invading, once again, the innocent rhythm of daily life, made me expect some give this second time around. When it didn’t, when it was still the same, what made me angry was that I could not manage it, not one week in this dance of inconvenience – making trips to the kitchen by the sound of doors closing, receiving gracious deliveries and invitations to go on distanced walks with my partner – yet despite the caution, the first feeling of fatigue arrived by the end of the week.

Informally, I had spent the past few months committing to being better at being by myself. Every now and then, I shouldered a weekend alone, which sounds so small. But I learned to enjoy it and sometimes, I asked for the time, realizing that I too needed to be away to think, to listen to the empty buzzing in my head. But this week alone, not only alone but isolated, was something altogether different. A challenge that caused a panic in me by day three. Eyes wide, looking at nothing but searching for a tool for escape. I walked to the library, fifteen minutes down the road. I returned my books by slipping them into the slit in the wall. I let one side of my mask hang on stretches of street where there were no people. And I felt better. Then my friends, who were also testing positive, invited me to hang. I felt saved. Suddenly, it was so warm to be among people. But then back in my room, wondering what tomorrow would bring, I felt the dull pang of loneliness. 

I began to wonder what I had then that sustained me through those secluded pandemic days. The dependency on comfort coming through the phone. The baking supplies and the plants and the people. And this. This routine of writing two pages, double spaced. The feeling of carving out a little field of my own. There was freedom in this field, as much as I wanted to give. 

As I began posting less, I learned that I had oh so many anxieties that limited and then limited further my sense of freedom. This happens to the best of us. We take breaks and hope that we come back renewed. I find that I still have so much to overthink about my little field. While I want to be defined by freedom, I am actually quite drawn to requirements. Over and over again, my friends pass me my spade and tell me to commit. Ironically, that is enough.

When I look to the past, I see naivete. I think longingly about how it can be the best source of courage. But novelty is brief and we spend so much more time wondering how to get back to the ease of excitement. Even if it wasn’t everything, and even if it didn’t always make sense. I am determined to find the clearing. And so I won’t edit too much. I won’t labor over it, even though I already have.

At least the urgency is still there, a bit messy, a bit discombobulated. Just imperfect enough.