just try to survive this

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 was active in this space. Since then, we put Truman to sleep and acquired two more dogs, bought a house, gained and lost weight and gained it back, got tenure, published two books. I’m back here 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.