Hold Me Close, Jake Peralta

Emotions are kind of new to me. 

That makes me sound like a serial killer. All that I mean is that I’m only just learning to let myself express how I really feel in real time, around real people. For the majority of my life, for one reason or another, I couldn’t process anything around anyone. I’d have to wait until I could be alone for a while to come to a conclusion that I knew was how I was genuinely feeling, instead of what other people wanted me to feel. I liked having a list, a strong logical argument to my feelings, I liked being able to examine them from every angle and know exactly how and why I feel what I feel.

I still sound like a serial killer. I can’t help that anymore.

That was all to say that now that I know how to express myself well, I can definitively say that this is the most boring sadness I’ve ever felt. There has not been one movie unturned, not one book opened and abandoned halfway through, not one weird DIY trick unattempted by me. I have made soap, banana bread, whipped coffee. I have gardened, walked, painted, drawn, sung, and binged Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Honestly, this is the most I’ve ever spoken to my family, and the most I’ve ever regretted all the plans I’ve said no to in favor of staying in. What a strange time to learn that everything I have chosen to do in life is really just a way to fill time between meals. 

Beginning today is my third quarantine. I can now say that I have officially been kicked out of two countries, so that rocks. My first week home was one of simply recovering, but once the third quarantine kicked in and my newfound hobbies were steadily draining away, I had no choice but to do the unthinkable: reflect on how I feel.

I feel bad. I’ve talked about this a little bit, but I’m going to talk about it some more. I don’t feel sympathy for you, dear reader, because if you are here, that means that you care enough to listen to me, and that is your own problem. Most nights have been interrupted with a bad dream, a feeling that I’ve missed my alarm, or an anxiety attack. One time last week I had gone to Lowe’s, and I forgot to wash my hair after like we’ve been told to do. I woke up coughing that night because I was so thirsty. It took two minutes to drink some water, and two hours to stop shaking from fear that I’d caught it. The air is thick right now, because Texas air is 10% oxygen and 90% sticky, but instead of its normal thick it is filled with Tense Thick, the kind of thick where pins are likely to be dropped in a rather obvious and raucous way. Everyday life is now smiling and trying to hide panic behind it with the effectiveness of a kindergartner hiding the cougar cub they brought home, asking their parents if they could keep it.

I wish I could say uplifting things right now. It’s become a motif of mine to look at the bright side of things, but for the moment there’s no bright side that isn’t simply trying to ignore the fear. I don’t care to ignore elephants in rooms. I suppose I only came here to say that what is happening is scary, and it’s okay to grieve for what life was like before this.

Because the hardest part is, I can’t go back to the way things were. The person I was before this is dead, and I am all that is left. The world that I left is dead, and no amount of optimism can bring it back. I am in mourning for my freedom, and my security. For my joy, and my love for the place around me, which is something I have never felt in my few years. I know the grief won’t bring it back, I know that I will get more dreams to replace the old ones. But for today I will wear my black and cry for my dead hope, and for every second that the world spent telling me that it will never return.

There are only two things keeping me afloat right now. The first is the comfort that God did not make a mistake in this time. No matter what I wrote in my calendar and said to my family, it was always written this way. I cannot be sad for too long about being robbed, because there was nothing to take away; the future was always in my head. There is only what was, and what is. And in this present, I have been blessed.

The second is that I’m not the only one who is sad right now. It is a very selfish thing to appreciate, but it is rather nice to know that we are all sort of angry together. Or, maybe it’s not so selfish, because when we are getting angry about this, we are working to fix it. We do not ignore it and hope it goes away without intervention; there is decisive action around the world that is saying that we will protect our people, even if it means we give up the world we’ve made for ourselves. We will stay well, even if it means that we give up on those dates written in our calendar for a moment.

And while we are getting well, we can all join together as a nation, world, and people, and watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine.