In time, I will believe there is meaning to this. In time it will be soaked with meaning. It is soaked already with content in a way that makes it difficult to write: all these branches clattering in the wind. Ben told me his mom died and I ask him questions but he has nothing to say, at home with the virus himself and can’t leave Brooklyn. For chrissakes.
Jesus fucking Christ I said when I came down the stairs from that phone call. You are saying Jesus a lot, my partner said. He smiled, like I was guilty of something I didn’t know about yet. A lot? I said, since when? He doesn’t have a good memory for things like this, so it’s easy for me to challenge most of his conclusions. I often force him to give a kind of data I know he won’t have. A marriage in time becomes a softer argument, I think, if it is going well. You toss a wet tennis ball. You are not so worried about getting it back.
I guess I have been saying Jesus a lot because he isn’t a god to me, just a speech of this country. I would like to share something with anyone and Jesus believed in sharing. This is not a hot take about religion, rather a stance in the middle of the room. The most I can do is look. I look at the screen in its new place on the coffee table for video calls. I look at the onions on the counter. This is the kind of meaning I can make.
The first day I didn’t know what to do, I translated half of Carla’s book of poems, the series about abortion. I don’t know if she wanted the baby. We haven’t been friends for that long. Eventually I think she would have told me, but time ended. Or maybe it doesn’t matter if she wanted the baby, and I’m waiting in the wrong direction. Carla was the last person to feed me before we all went underground. Some beets fried in a pan with mayonnaise, a combination I myself would never heat.
On the tenth day, it is difficult to wake up. I wait not just until I can hear the coffee grinding, but also until I hear the toaster ping. It’s worth getting up in the morning because I have my group where we study the story of Inanna, the oldest known goddess. I never turn on my video for this call, nor do I speak. One of the strangers on the call reads aloud: When she leaned against the apple tree, her vulva was wondrous to behold. I attempt leaning back in my desk chair, but the world feels dry.
The instructor of the class plays music off her computer while we write and the music is only slightly warped through the video chat. On the fifteenth day, we read: Rejoicing at her wondrous vulva, the young woman Inanna applauded herself. I clench and try to drive energy from the base of me everywhere else like it’s sacred, but unfortunately, I associate this movement with the word kegels.
I wish I had something to say that wasn’t so sincere. I laugh, but it’s only at things as they are. On the twentieth day I realize I no longer enjoy wine. Will I ever? Past and present and future are in such odd relation to one another now. What someone else knows before I do, and when they choose to report.
Some of my friends have had panic reactions, my mother said to me on the twenty-second day. This is the closest she has gotten to saying something of her own. This right after she asked could we talk on the phone and before she started making souffles.
On the twenty-fourth day my partner and I both owned up to being boring at dinner. I want to be better for you, I said. He stopped me, one hand on one hand, but we are both so tired from starting things and starting things all day long. In a lame attempt to do something I had made us some split pea soup with Middle-Eastern spices. Silky Lebanese split pea soup, the recipe read. It took much much longer than a regular split pea soup to make and tasted marginally more like hummus.
Good thing I love hummus, my partner said. His tolerance is a big part of what is saving us these days, that and the practice he has invented called “the lumberjack workout” which is when he takes the two cords of wood from the fireplace out onto the porch, puts on Micah’s highest energy house music mix, and begins weightlifting the wood in different directions. The wood is still in its plastic sack with reinforced rubber handles, and my partner also wears gloves so as not to get splinters. In certain ways he is someone who is better than being embarrassed, a person who cares less, patiently lifting consumer objects from the grocery store.
For his lunch on the twenty-fifth day, my partner fries a sausage and some potatoes. The sausage we bought from Nip n’ Tuck Farm down the road, which I think is a pretty horrible name for a farm in a beach town where lots of highly altered rich ladies come in the summer. After my partner finishes his lunch, he scoops out some ice cream onto the same plate where it just barely swims in pork fat.
It is unfortunate that I am tracking so closely what he is eating. Sometimes I have to remind him to please not express regret about his ice cream eating, because it is a body image trigger for me. He runs cold water over his plate and this does not get the oily coating to run off completely. Sometimes we can be a bad influence on one another because he was a chubby kid, too, and we harbor some related restrictions.
I am guilty of doing exercise videos in which they talk about preparing for swimsuit season, a comment which I have to hold as very funny so it doesn’t literally kill me. Also I live by the ocean and the beaches are full of thin-boned birds that presage something about the ideal inhabitants in high season.
Just before holing up inside forever, I bought a bathing suit. It’s the first bathing suit I’ve had since I’ve had breasts that didn’t come with underwire in it, and I consider this a major triumph. I guess I’m talking about body image now.
On the tenth day, Avery tweeted a confession that the quarantine was bringing out old body image issues for her. It felt generous of her to then let us reach out, let me reach out, even though I didn’t know what to say that wasn’t covering it with my own experience. Instead I just wrote “I see you, friend.” It felt kind of distancing, I dunno, it’s something I learned to say in California. A nonviolent response that doesn’t put my body on your lap or yours on mine. Its clinical tone is annoying but also feels like shelter.
On the thirtieth day, my partner wants to make sourdough chocolate chip cookies. I say no, some things have to be normal. I am having trouble falling asleep. When he wiggles toward me from the other side of the bed, I call him noodle. I have never called him this before. His long white body moves from far away to next to me. He isn’t food, but a person.
Though we have been together ten years, there is a new element of awkwardness around how we hold one another in bed. I think I am trying new ways to lie against him instead of the old ways, but suddenly there is a hip there at the wrong angle and parts do not correctly meet parts. I twist one arm around his back and then, frustrated, fling it away from both of us. Do you want me to let go, he says.
Let go. Let go of what you used to have and no, you don’t have it anymore, you have a cloudy wind-sky with skeleton trees crossing. The touch of someone who sees what you like for breakfast, and when. The invasion of your space conditional on how many calls you’ve had that day, if you’re still patient enough to take them. Do you still want to be known.