One thing I have found in the midst of the insanity is that I have some really beautiful, kind, and extraordinary humans in my world. I write this through tears as I listen to a voicemail from my friend in Venice. We’re all doing our best. Some are doing a little more. And it matters, a lot.
This is a great public reckoning, superimposed upon a colossal private reckoning of my own, though as I type this out I know that some of us have it far worse than I. But it is fruitless and dangerous to compare grief.
2020 began as a surreal nightmare, but I am acquainted with the darkness and its many monsters. I’ve been through worse, much worse, than this bizarre experience unfolding before me, I thought. I’d been through basic training for life’s insanity. I was getting by with a little help from my friends. I could always call the police if the situation escalated any further, but I resisted doing that, because I didn’t want to hurt a hurting person. He just needed time. We needed space, and we needed time. Everybody was going to be all right.
Everybody was going to be all right. Just a rough patch, that’s all. We suffer, but we get through.
And then it got worse. Unimaginably worse. Time to redefine the word “nightmare”.
I tried to use the coping mechanisms I’d learned from my first tragedy. I worked and wrote and called friends and danced and sweat and tried to sing. But I couldn’t stop sobbing and shaking. I couldn’t stop the nightmares. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t wake up. I couldn’t eat for a week. On the eighth day I tried again and my body rejected it violently. I left Los Angeles.
And then the world got sick.
I think that one thing that grief threatens us with is getting stuck in it. And now we’re all literally, legally mandated to stay in one place. Wherever you are. However much hurt and horror you’re in, you cannot move from there. None of us have been here before, but all of us must remain right here in it. Til the storm passes. When’s that? How do I do this? How can anybody? What a shit time for a private screening of your very own horror movie. On a loop. Ad infinitum. Alone. No end date specified. What?
I don’t know if I could have saved him; I know that I tried to help for a very long time. But I don’t know anything anymore. I’m scared and heartbroken and alone. I miss California. I miss everything. I miss everybody. I could really use a hug.
As every possible evil flies out of Pandora’s box, the one last tiny but all-important thing asks to be let out, too: hope. To the people who have connected in any way with me over the past blur of unimaginable days: I am forever in your debt. It may seem like a small thing to send a text, or write an email, or make a (gasp!) phone call, but right now, and particularly to me, in the midst of this shitshow within the larger global shitshow, every one of these kindnesses is enormous and life-giving, even if I can’t always express that as well as I feel it. The tiniest little points of human contact have been very real sustenance as the world, and my world, crumbles. I’m so grateful to you all. I want to wake up from this bad dream, but it rages on. I’ll keep holding on. I hope you will too.
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