Last Christmas stands out as one of the worst of my life. Perhaps more even than the year when my father had just died, because at least then we were around family. But last year Rand’s grandmother had just died, and we were alone, and there wasn’t an end to that loneliness in sight.
In the last few days, I wrote a review that escaped out of my hands and started running all over the internet, and it was not unlike that time when I was ten and my hamster got out of its cage and pooped everywhere. What I could not have imagined – what I at my…
It’s February. 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 –…
It is December 31st, the last day of 2020 – a year that has been supersaturated with so much shit and grief that it’s almost bordered the absurd. I have been to a Zoom wedding and a Zoom baby shower and a Zoom funeral, experiencing the spectrum of human existence in halting pixilation. I try…
Grief is weird when the world is normal. Everyone just goes about with their day, walking around, and sometimes the sun even has to audacity to shine, and when you are grieving, all of it feels like an insult. I told Rand once that I wished that human beings had chyrons – those little scrolling…
Six months into an interminable lockdown, I find myself missing the long dead. The throughline feels like a logical one – it’s a pandemic. Of course I’m thinking about death. 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…
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…
I woke up this morning, our sixth week of sheltering-in-place, or maybe our seventh (I’ve lost count) and the days have started to run together in a way they never have before. I thought time only worked like that in memory. When I think of the summer after high school or Christmas breaks when I…
Social isolation has sort of felt like a break-up – a sensation that, after nearly 20 years with my husband, returns to me like a hazy, rotten memory. “Oh, this,” I think, as I pull myself out of bed, forgetting what day it is, and mash an OREO into my maw. “I remember this. It…
