Isolationists

The college road trip that solidified our friendship: 10 days from VA to MS back to NY where we never got tired of each other and went from roommates to Halves.

In another reality, this morning I landed in Sydney. In that same reality - the one that was until it wasn’t - I was spending six weeks with my best friend and her newborn baby in a faraway country, taking myself on little adventures in a new city and wondering how my plants were doing. I was (finally!) going to the Great Barrier Reef - an overnight on a tour boat and a day trip to a nearby waterfall. I was going to visit old friends, maybe go to Melbourne. I booked the flight to Sydney a few months into her pregnancy; my job could travel, why not move it to her.

Then the world changed. As the gates began to (literally and metaphorically) close, I half-seriously considered flying out early. I checked flights daily. I told her, my family, my clients, that I might just show up on her doorstep. And then it was too late.

There are many things I want to write about this: my deep love for this woman, the immense joy and sadness I get in seeing her now two-week old baby (it’s a boy!!!), my regret for not going, my relief I stayed. The reality that if I had gone, I don’t know when I would have come back and then there would have been four of us in their little two bedroom, with my life sitting in a full yet vacant Brooklyn apartment.

And yet. If there is one thing you can never replicate, it’s holding your favorite person’s newborn first child so she and her husband can take a nap. I want to feel his little fingers grab on to me, to sit next to her folding laundry as she feeds him, to have that feeling - that auntly feeling - that just being there is a value.

But those are not the things I came here to talk about (I guess? Except clearly I did). I wanted to talk about the immense strangeness of difference and sameness of what is happening.

I live alone and for the last 18 months I’ve been working from home. In many ways, my life today is the same as it has been for a while. Bouts of loneliness broken up by work and friends and family, all pretty standard stuff. And yet sometimes I’m forced to remember that alternate reality, to remember that beneath the sameness is a vast difference; all the things that were supposed to happen but now just won’t. Friends and family have left the city, possibly never to return; I turned 35 over video; the only time my full face feels the sun is when I’m on my fire escape. My parents could die and I would never see them again. Same, same, but different.

Today, I was having one of those days where I knew that if I could be in another space, I could focus. But, of course (of course?), there is no other space. There is only here. This biggish-for-New-York one bedroom. I could have moved home, I could have flown to Australia, I could have gone upstate, all of which were possible but none of which were right. There isn’t really a right in a pandemic, I guess, but at least here, my tiny life is *my* tiny life.

The city is still, now, with the quiet broken up by emergency vehicles. Shops are shuttered, streets are empty. I don’t know when I will see my friends again. I don’t know when I will see my family again. I don’t know when I will ever get to meet this baby. The summer is going to be long and hot, then back to maybe an even scarier winter. I’m mostly fine - not good, not bad, just fine - and sometimes deeply sad. I don’t know when I or any of us will see good again.

Same, same, but different.