After The End

Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting outside on my friend's stoop in Queens, talking about this and that and whatever thing. You know how it is with queer introverts. What are you reading? What video games are you playing? Excavate any secrets from your soul lately? It was one of those days when you could tell autumn was getting ready to win the war with summer, even though it was still hot enough to sweat in the direct sun. But the Pin Oak right in front of their apartment building was covering us with shade to spare, and we were both done with our work for the day, and we hadn’t seen each other in so long, and I thought, “Gosh, I could sit out here with them all afternoon." 

There are so many things I can't do anymore. Can't ride my bike. Not with any real consistency. Three or four times a year, maybe, I can go for an hour-long slow-roll if all the factors line up just right. Can't sit in a sports bar with my wife, drinking Coney Island Mermaid Pilsner, and cheering with the rest of the crowd for Coco Gauff or for the Women's US National Team or against the New York Jets. Can't sit inside any bar or any restaurant actually. Can't spend a breezy spring day with the windows thrown open, crawling thieves' dens with my friends in an eight-hour session of Dungeons & Dragons. Can't be face-to-face with people who aren't taking serious COVID precautions, which is most people. Can't stand up very long. Can't stand still really at all. Can't work full-time. Can't read sometimes. 

My last therapist worried I wasn't grieving enough for all the things Long COVID took from me, probably because she didn't see the anguish that consumed me in the beginning. No one did, besides my wife and my sister. The raw, hoarse way I cried out, "I'm losing everything,” as I sobbed hot tears into Stacy's chest and neck and stomach, soaking through her shirts with my despair. “I'm losing myself.” They were scared for me, my sister and my wife, in ways I'd never seen them scared before — because I was hopeless and heartbroken in ways I'd never been before. Stacy told me, much later, that in those early days the light had gone out in my eyes. 

My therapist wanted me to make a Long COVID Wish List, bullet points of things I wish had been different, so I could look my loss in the face and move through the stages to acceptance. I did try. I wish the President of the United States hadn't hidden and lied about… everything. (I wish people I love hadn’t voted for that president.) I wish the CDC had been honest about the benefits of wearing masks. I wish being anti-science wasn't a religious and political way of life. I wish friends spent less time trying to make me feel guilty and more time using the supercomputer in their pocket to try to understand what was happening to me. I wish colleagues hadn't read my sickness as weakness and tried to exploit and punish me because of it. I wish doctors didn't think they were infallible. 

The truth is that I lost my faith all at once. In the institutions that I'd trusted my entire life to keep me safe and healthy — or, bare minimum, to keep me informed with actual facts. In so many people I loved and had admired. In communities that had, at one time, been my salvation.

The refrain, back in the beginning, was, "Help is coming!" But I didn't believe that because I’ve witnessed the ways we devalue veterans and the impoverished and first responders and the lives of literal children. I never said it out loud, but every time someone told me help was coming for my Long COVID, I thought, "If they won’t send help for schoolchildren who are getting gunned down in their classrooms, there's no way they're going to send help for me." I thought, “We’re broken beyond repair.” I thought, "I'm going to be fighting for the rest of my life to get even people who love me to just believe me." 

I never finished that list for my therapist. I quoted NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy to her. The title of the prologue of the first book is "you are here" and it goes like this: "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things." This end, Jemisin says, is "writ continentally," which seems like the absolute worst thing, but it's always the personal endings that hurt hardest and longest and most. That's what it's like being a human. The world at large is mostly context. What the main character learns in the Broken Earth trilogy isn't just how to survive after the end of the world; what she learns is the force of her own magic, and the force of a magic that belongs only to the feral, to those who have no lies to un-learn about their own power. 

I grieved the world I lost — the world we all lost — because of COVID and I grieved the life I lived in that world. It wasn't a slow-rolling grief where optimism trickled out of me like a leaky faucet. My eyes were clear. My mourning encompassed so many deaths.

But there's a difference between accepting what’s over and displaying what’s over — and on my friend's stoop on that perfect nearly autumn afternoon, I decided, for the first time since I got sick, to let someone besides my wife and my sister really see it.

I usually have an hour, maybe ninety minutes, of socializing in person before my brain fog rolls in. Much less on the phone. Half an hour max. When the brain fog appears, I always immediately hop up and head home or hang up. I can sense it at the edge of my vision, a kind of closing in on the frame of my eyes. My head gets hot, like a computer overheating. I start sweating, but a cold sweat. Chills. My chest gets tight. It feels like I'm trying to think through sludge. My brain is a swamp. Everything inside my head moves slower and disconnects. Words start dropping out of sentences and then sentences start dropping out of my mind. My mind feels dull and cloudy. I stutter. I can feel the thing I want to communicate, but I can't do it with my words. I speak very very slowly, if I speak at all.

That day I was thinking about the Broken Earth. I was thinking, "What you suddenly understand is this: magic derives from life—that which is alive, or was alive, or even that which was alive so many ages ago that it has turned into something else." I was thinking how long I'd known this friend, how much we'd lived through together, how we're not the same people we were when we met, how we have become something else. Better. Brighter. Broken in new ways too. How that is a kind of magic, and one I've hardly ever known. How they're alive and I'm alive and that's magic too. Alive, on a stoop, in the late afternoon sun, shade, a FedEx truck in front of us beeping and nudging a car out of the way with its bumper, people coming in and out of the building to put their empty pizza boxes in the recycling bin, my friend’s stories and my laughter and no words out of my mouth and still alive, alive, alive.

You don't really consider Mary Oliver when you consider the end of the world, but the wonder she writes about upon witnessing grasshoppers and seashells and the morning dew is not, in fact, writ continentally. She's not writing about every insect and every fish on the planet, about hope in the simple fact of sunrise. She's taking it all so personally. This bird on this day seen from this window on this cot from which she can scarcely move because she is so weighed down by what she's lost. She sees that bird and she thinks that dying will go on. There's no end or return from some kinds of grief, no answer, no coming out of it. And yet, this bird! This bird! 

Which is the only way to love, isn't it?
This isn't a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold [what’s lost] in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song,
And I say to my heart: rave on.

I let the brain fog roll over me that day on that stoop because I wanted to be there with my friend more than I wanted to hide my sadness and my less sharp self away. I was going to pay, physically and cognitively, and that was okay. I started sentences I couldn't finish. I asked questions I already knew the answer to. I repeated myself. And then repeated myself again. I reached out and touched their purple hair, the soft nerdy t-shirt they were wearing. "All forms of your brain are my favorite," they said. The world had ended and we had moved on to more interesting things.