Every couple of days, sometimes a handful of times in the same day, my mother makes the same declaration: J’en ai marre ! It’s one of the things that just sounds better in French — the last word a harsh snarl to the world. In the middle of washing a dish, she drops it, ceramic clatter against the sink: J’en ai marre ! She emerges from an hour of coaxing students, now just pixels on a screen, into their dialogues and verbs, and growls, J’en ai marre. And once, twice maybe, she has stood in the middle of a room, looking lost in her own house, with her eyes pooling silver and her voice trembling when she says, J’en ai marre.
It means: I’ve had enough. It means: I can’t stand this anymore. It means: I’m tired. I’m so tired.
Putain, que j’en ai marre.
I am tired. Too tired for metaphor, for the rise and fall of narrative, for anything but the simplest, plainest words. I want to see my friends. I miss my neighborhood (which will not be mine much longer). I want to feel safe walking around outside again. I miss hugs, and making someone dinner in my kitchen, and browsing bookstores, and and and. I am too tired to be anything but a creature of gouged spaces and achings. It is exhausting to be in a constant state of mourning for a life that, let’s be blunt here, is not coming back anytime soon.
But, see. I lied, just then. Because it’s not truly constant. There are minutes, sometimes an hour, when I forget there’s a pandemic. I forget in the midst of a book chapter, or on the fifth yoga pose, or when my lover makes a joke so bad and so good that my face hurts from laughing. I forget when I am eyebrows-deep in learning the pickings of a song. I forget when my mother finds a photo of herself at my age and we both exclaim at how alike we look.
I feel guilty when I forget. I remind myself I am fortunate to have breathing room, to be able to forget about something so monstrous and all-consuming — to not be consumed by it, even for a minute or two.
But I am tired of feeling guilty, too. Putain, que j’en ai marre. We deserve to not be consumed by this. We deserve space and time to consume our own lives instead, to drink them in, as they are happening. Because they are. However gridlocked we feel, we are not still lifes. We are still living.
Following are some moments I’ve caught in the past two weeks. Mostly mundane, none momentous. Doesn’t matter. They are still my life. And they are valuable just for that. I hope they bring you a sliver of distraction, of delight, of calm.
A moment of deserved forgetting.
