what the body remembers

My grandmother always smelled of roses. The biggest cliché, but the truth, nevertheless. For my entire life, she wore the same drugstore perfume that my mother brought her from the States, a mix of powder and petal. It went well with the rest of her: so petite that I grew taller than her very early, the skin of her neck soft and cool when I tucked my face there, her smile always rosy-appled. For a long time after her passing, I stayed away from roses — not necessarily because the reminder was painful, but because I knew the scent wouldn’t live up to the memory.

In a Bed Bath & Beyond a few years ago, I picked up a bottle of hand soap on a whim and inhaled. Peeling shutters, walls papered with flowers, knife scraping jam on bread, all this flooded in on that one breath. I was a teenager when she died, unable to go to the funeral a continent away. The summers I spent with her had started to feel like misremembered dreams, and they felt suddenly, momentarily sharper. But standing there in the kitchen aisle, it felt like the first time I fully understood what I had lost. Years of mourning fell through my ribcage and knocked me windless. My grief, a trespasser through a rotten wood floor.

---

Scent is one of the strongest harbingers of memory, but the past can come up anywhere in the body: a familiar building or face, a piece of clothing. I’d be remiss as an artist if I left out music, which has been proven to help dementia patients regain some of their cognitive function, for example. And sometimes it’s much simpler than that: a song can pull us back to the moment we first heard it, the season we played it over and over, the person who made it important.

A nostalgia of the senses is one we don’t ask for. It comes at us swinging, plunging us headfirst into lost time. At best, it might bring us comfort, an echo of sweeter times; at worst, it could remind us of what is no longer ours to enjoy, or bring back our worst ordeals and traumas. One lonely, desperate winter in college, and now every year the first grey chill of November makes my stomach curl. The waft of jasmine is long dazzling nights out with friends in a perfume bottle. A particular blend of spices and tea reminds me too much of an ex to be drinkable.

I am not a scientist, and not even they can explain all the strange workings of memory. But these days, I have been thinking about what will remind me of this time — this year, suspended, hung on a clothesline between the others. I’m not talking about the things written in newspapers or in journals, not the way we will recount this time to those who didn’t live through it, not the things found dust-buried in basements. I mean more the things felt, stacked in the basement of the body, waiting to be called up. A glimpse or a scent or a song, that might cross me in months or years from now, and bring this year and its fury of stillness rushing back.

---

My therapist likes to talk about grounding. When she says it, I always imagine planting my feet firmly below me, two childlike stomps, refusing to be blown away. In the early days of isolation, she encouraged me to come out of my head in moments of anxiety or emotional flatline, to describe where I was using only my senses. It’s a good tool, for someone who more easily defaults to the regrets and golden days of the past, or the terrors of the future. To ask my brain to recognize my body. To work with the moment I have.

Sometimes I worry that my sense memories of this year will be all gold-tipped, cataloging the elusive mundane pleasures. Or the opposite: I panic that my body will be marked by this year like a brand, that I will carry the fear and the hopelessness with me and never be able to take it off.

But sometimes, I hear my therapist’s voice: You’re in your head again. Only what’s around you. What’s in you.

I take a long breath, I look around. My body notices, lets everything steep like tea leaves.

The bar of soap I have been using all summer, milky citrus so sharp that it stings on the inhale. The bellyaching wail of a fire engine, crimson headlights flashing sleepless across the ceiling. Four o’clock, when sunlight spreads across the kitchen like honey over bread. Crying so hard that the salt borders on the sour point of vomiting. White lilies filling a room with their drowsy green-sweetness.

For better or worse, my body will remember more clearly than I can.

---

Further reading

• New Study Indicates That Sense of Smell Could Play Major Role in New Approaches to Treating PTSD (McLean Hospital)

• Inherited Trauma Shapes Your Health (The Atlantic)

• How Will We Remember The Coronavirus Pandemic? (Discover Magazine)

a birthday index

Content warning, sweet friend: if you wish to avoid mentions or discussions of death, I would recommend you skip the 2nd paragraph labeled “Twenty-six” of this piece.

• Seven. Every birthday, I had the same kind of cake. My parents would always play through the farce of asking, at least: “You sure you don’t want something new?” I never did. Angel food cake, with store-bought strawberries pushed into the pillowy top, and canned whipped cream. I would tip the can into my mouth, my mother scolding me half-heartedly, until she smiled and I grinned back, clouds dissipating between my teeth.

• Eight. The June day of my classroom birthday party (remember when you could do that?), my mood ring got stuck on my finger during read-aloud time. By the time my father arrived with the cake I was in tears, my finger swollen beyond recognition, the ring still oiled and sudsy from the remedies my teacher had tried. There was no party; there was a ride to the local fire department, where a kind and broad-shouldered firefighter sawed off my ring. He gave me a T-shirt “for being brave,” soft and blue-black like the sky from my window, that came down to my knees. I slept in it for weeks. I don’t remember if I had cake at all.

• Eleven. It was the first summer my parents spent separated. My mother swept us overseas alone; neither my aunt nor my grandmother spoke of my father at the table. I begged my mother to let me get my ears pierced, not really expecting her to say yes after months. But on one of the hot southern-sea days leading up to my birthday, she finally relented. The posts ached in my ears; every night for the rest of July I rinsed the punctures with saline. Two little wounds I was so proud to carry, to put on display. It took me years to realize my mother probably caved because of my father’s absence: she knew I missed him, and that even stoppered as we were in this homeland capsule, nothing would be the same for me after it. What were a couple of holes punched in my ears to the ones my parents felt they had hollowed out in me?

• Seventeen. No time for parties. I was weeks headlong into a music program where I was a local among too many out-of-towners, where I would make no friends because I wasn’t in the dorms. I spent the morning of my birthday parsing solfège intervals in a cramped classroom; no one wished me anything because as far as they knew there wasn’t anything to wish. My boyfriend got me a melodica, and I learnt how much to breathe to keep a note going long enough to reach the next. He broke up with me barely a week later, saying he hadn't wanted to ruin my birthday. He left me sobbing, gasping for air under a big oak tree in the park. I didn’t come out of my room for a week. The melodica has remained unplayed in a closet at my mother’s house ever since.

• Twenty-five. I’ve come to think of my birthday as a gathering point, the sultry apex of summer. My favorite people crammed into too small a space, talking and laughing like bubbles in a glass. Lanterns strung on the wall, papery and fragile, the light bouncing off gleaming cheeks and throwing bottles into shadow. On a birthday everyone looks beautiful, not just the person who was born. I wear the nicest dress I have and flit from person to person and revel in the blush. Their love, my love, seeping together, winestains on the carpet. A mess I will not clean up in the morning. A wish I am always making, candleless, for it to always be like this.

• Twenty-six. When I wake on my birthday, it is under the sky’s swollen grey belly, the choking threat of storm. My lover tries to get me out of bed and I start crying from how little I slept, and then cry again seeing the balloons he's set up for me. I walk twenty minutes to pick up cake from a nearby shop; sweat slips down my back, around my waist, unwanted touch. It feels like another skin, thin film between me and the world, not protective but motionless. I walk without going anywhere, I go about the day that is supposed to change me without changing. I watch the same show I always watch when I need a layer of static, something to thin out the molasses in my head. Texts and well-wishes filter in over the hours: I try to keep answering them until finally I just stop. I notice that they all say things like, “hope the day is good,” and “sending so much love today.” No one says anything about the year to come. No one wants to talk about what comes next, because no one knows. Least of all me.

• Twenty-six. In the week that I am supposed to celebrate a new year of life, I seem be surrounded by — or maybe only able to notice — death. I think about how many people this year will never have a birthday again. How deadly of a year this has been. The news racks up death tolls and murders and tragic accidents like poker chips. Being alive feels like a gamble these days, a horrible joke with no punchline. I think about how many stupid and horrible and unjust and frightening ways there are to die. “I think about that just crossing the street,” my lover remarks when I bring it up. The offhand way he says it makes my arms erupt in gooseflesh. How do you feel about another year? I imagine someone asking me, microphone to my face. At least I’m alive, I’m grateful, the beauty-pageant version of me says, hand to her heart. But something else, feral, stirs in my chest and whimpers, I’m scared every second. Aren’t you?

Twenty-six. I told him all I wanted for my birthday was to see the ocean, so the day after, we wake before six and drive. The plan is to go straight to the beach three hours north — but when we arrive the lots are already full and the strip of shore is choked with bodies. I bite back the panic attack rising in my throat and Google Maps somewhere nearby, anywhere, that might be deserted and open. About an hour later we trudge down a hot dusty trail, reedy grasses swaying on either side. The ocean-roar nears and nears like a homing device between my ribs. I nearly miss it at first: a wood sign, unassuming arrow, reads “Shore Access.” I trip down the path not more than a sandal’s width, and then there I am. My heart catches at the sight of the waves, terrible and foaming, smashing over the rocks to spill over the pebbles at our feet. It isn’t the beach, but I’ve always gotten bored lying on the sand for hours, and this time I would have been at risk. Now I sit on a sun-singed rock with my soles in a salt pool. He kisses my shoulder. The clamor of the tide and the gulls circling is welcome, is chaos. Everything about this feels right: the blue savagery of the sea, the scorching sky, the world so terrifying and so beautiful all at once. Yes, I am alive. I’m grateful. I’m scared every second. Aren’t you?

in the cards

The storms have been rolling through for days now. The moment before always feels like a wire hidden in cotton, metallic jolt in the thick air. And then — the sudden hiss and tear as the skies open. Summer storms are a language buried in me somewhere, one I always forget how to speak until the season comes round again. When I was little, I always knew a storm was coming by its color — a smokey sort of purple, crackling, sputtering with city lights.

The storms followed me across hundreds of miles this week, from the house I was a teenager in all the way back to Brooklyn. Some things have changed: everyone masked in the street, I see only their eyes, it feels somehow accusatory. Barricades stand abandoned in the streets, slogans and black fists taped to lampposts, remnants of June’s wildfire protests. (They’re still going, but I don’t hear the voices wafting over the rooftops anymore.)

Some things don’t change. Workless, the hours of my days roll off each other’s edges. I have to close the windows to stop the apartment drowning, the storms haven’t let up. For the first time I feel their menace, their steel-toothed hunger, saying where do you think you’re going, saying we’re not done with you.

I draw tarot. Not every day, but almost. A usually stable ritual, reminding me what I owe attention to. Now every card comes up on its head. I try not to think about the metaphor, but it’s hard with the cards berating me. Page of Wands — you have tried something and it has fallen flat in defeat, disillusion. Ace of Wands — you feel sluggish and stuck, something that should be easy isn't. Eight of Cups — you are lost with no solution to your problem. No end in sight. I think about my glasses, only a year old: worn for driving, concerts, menus tacked onto walls, things existing at a distance. Without them, the far end of my vision softens and seeps into itself, watercolor confusion, rain across the windshield. A lot of life feels that way right now — no room to see anything past the bridge of my nose, to plan or commit or even have the audacity to hope. No end in sight.

I write. I rewrite. I hate how many times I use the word “I.” I don’t know how to do this anymore.

---

Last week (only last week?), another knifelike storm hanging over my back, I descended into my parents’ basement. Rain slapping asphalt outside, I pored over the wreckage of two decades: composition books, birthday cards, photographs. It was the perfect task to chew on for someone whose gums are lined with nostalgia, sweetening everything that came before.

I found, in all of it, a letter I wrote at twenty-one to someone I loved. The love I had for him was bitter and hidden, a searing brand; the letter was meant never to be sent. I didn’t know there was a storm hiding in me, too, until I read it. The grief gathered under my breastbone, dark and swollen, crackled into a million volts through my ribcage, spilled out over my lashes. I wanted so badly to close her wound over, to tell her she would find what she wanted. (Which was what? Someone who loved her back, someone better.)

I think, maybe, I am trying to say something about growth. About what we want and how we get there.

I’m trying. I’m trying. The words are coming now.

---

Nothing in my days ever feels as important as what is happening outside of them. Old heartbreak feels like an airhead study, creative destitution is better than real destitution. Joy feels expendable, like it holds no weight, here, in this world where it feels like any move by any person could be fatal: death by pathogen, by institution, by skin color. My weather app shows storms every other day, crush of gravity on an existence already groaning at the joints.

There is something I forgot about one of the tarot cards. The Eight of Cups. A piece of its significance that escaped me until I thumbed to its page in my book. Experiment, say eight cups hanging empty from their pedestals, and find what’s best. Try to move forward.

Here’s the thing about that letter, and the love I wanted that me to find: she would. I did. I don’t think it was an accident, or fated. I think it was a choice, one I made over and over, to look for the love I wanted and deserved.

It was a covenant I made with myself: bound not by what would happen if I broke it, but by what would come to me if I kept it.

The cards will keep tumbling onto their heads, until they turn upright. The storms will keep coming, until they don’t. But those are things beyond my abilities. Whether as small as a good day or as vast as liberation, I have to keep choosing the things I want. Even — maybe especially — on the days they feel as out of reach as the roaring-sparkler skies.

But it’s still one hour after the next, one day to the one after. So I write. I rewrite. I read, in the way I used to as a child, hungry and obsessively. I’m trying. I’m trying. I’m making notes, saving melodies, listening when I feel the urge to speak. I hope this is what choosing looks like. I hope the choices lead somewhere.

being, verb

A preface—

I put my last missive to you on hold because in the face of the enormous movement for Black lives and against institutionalized racism that has crossed borders and continents, it felt right to listen and let Black voices lead. It’s important to me to share some of the resources I have found helpful in both action and education during this time, including: this list of bail funds across the country, this reading on frameworks of racial identity, this roundup of contemporary books by Black writers, and this constantly-updated hub for petitions, places to donate, protest resources, and more. Seeking out tangible actions and learning spaces is what has resonated most with me, and perhaps it will with you. The movement is not over, it’s ongoing — and so is my intent to learn, to act, to move forward.

Similarly, it’s easy for me to think of Small Histories as something ineffable, smoke signals evaporating into the ether. Some of that is just natural shyness on my part, and some of it is feeling as though I’m writing for myself. But if there is anything I’ve learnt so far from this phoenix of a month, it’s that now is not the time for shyness, and that change only happens when we cross the usual delineations of our small universes. Small Histories is a series fundamentally based in my own experience: the loose threads, the ropes and pulleys of my life. It will continue to be; it will, I hope, if I do this right, also step outside it when needed. And in this, I would like you and I to make a covenant: not to be afraid to speak to each other. If something I wrote stirs something in you, please say it. If something doesn’t sit right with you, please say that too. I will do my best to listen, learn, and reply.

Black lives matter, in their every iteration. Black women, Black trans people, Black disabled people matter. Black art, Black joy, Black life, being lived, matters. I am saying it because it bears repeating. I am saying it because it is always, always true.

---

There is a story my family likes to tell about my great-uncle: how he sat in the field sprawling below the farmhouse with a box of matches, dropped one lit, and set the tall grasses blazing. They laugh at this story. I don’t. I have only ever imagined the wall of flame, the buckets being passed from hand to hand.

June feels like that. A match dropped to parched, crackling ground, and the world sprung into flame. When I say I’m watching the world burn, I don’t mean in terms of destruction (though that too, and that’s for another time). I mean the urgency. The fever. The rage. It suffuses me, smolders in me. Isolated as I am with two people at high risk for COVID — making protests a non-option — I have set about signing, donating, sharing, emailing, calling. Verbs that feel real and solid and anything but idle.

On the ninth day of the George Floyd protests in New York, I moved out of my apartment, a moment I’d come to figuratively kicking and screaming after being forced to try finding a new roommate mid-pandemic. By the next night, I was back in my mother’s house — without my lover who’d stayed back in the city, without a permanent residence, still without a job. Without the usual relief of oncoming summer and its gatherings and small joys, without any visible end to a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands. It struck me suddenly and forcibly how many holes I had. A moth-eaten curtain in the wind.

Since then it has been a descent into something unnameable, but that I know well. Instead of on fire, I feel pulled underwater. Voices muffled, every emotion through a veil, except one: This will never end. I will never get out. I am still trying to be anything but idle, still choosing verb over noun, but I have slowed.

I’ve been thinking about something I learnt in college on the German philosopher Heidegger. Earlier philosophers like Descartes preached absolute objectivity, lifting oneself out of daily banality to achieve perfect reason. Heidegger pushed back with his concept of Dasein, of “being-in-the-world”: that human beings are not just beings, noun, but are instead in a constant and active state of being, verb, in the world. Each of us, as a human being, is born into a very specific existence — one that we cannot shake or ever step outside of.

This past week saw the murder of Oluwatoyin Salau, a young Black activist who came to the forefront of the George Floyd protests. There is a video of Toyin at a recent protest that I can’t stop thinking about. In it she says, “At the end of the day, I cannot take my f-cking skin color off. I cannot mask this sh-t, okay? Everywhere I f-cking go, I’m profiled whether I like it or not. I’m looked at whether I like it or not.” It’s bubbling, viscous, her warranted fury that this thing she cannot change about herself is held against her, is weaponized against her. “Look at my hair, look at my f-cking skin,” she rasps into a microphone. “This sh-t —— I can’t take this sh-t off. So guess what? I’mma die about it.”

That last, so defiant, haunts me now. Toyin was too horribly right. She died simply for her Dasein, for the fact of her being in the world: a young dark-skinned Black woman who was vocal about the rights of those who, like her, get ignored and brutalized and killed simply for who they are. Not their choices, but their being.

Part of what pushed me to the bottom of where I am right now is the thought that I cannot deny my own Dasein, either. I can never not be white, Bostonian, American, French, middle-class, born in the 1990s, public school, college-educated, raised in a major city, ad nauseam. I can never deny that I was born, geographically and historically, into a landscape of systems that were designed to benefit people who look like me and to harm those who don’t.

But being-in-the-world, as Heidegger conceives of it, is an idea that moves and breathes. Individual Dasein changes as the world around a human being changes, and as that human being decides to change how they move through the world. New tools, ideas, language, landscapes —— all this can shift the way just one or a thousand people move through their world.

The fire of this moment is more than needed, is urgent. Non-Black people have to acknowledge that our being-in-the-world results, directly or not, in Black people dying just for being. But the long-term work of changing the world around me, and the ways I interact with it, is something else: candle-flame that has to keep the light, through flickering, through breath of wind.

Right now, to me, being in the world feels immensely hard. It feels heavy and seasick, dragged over the lip of the ocean shelf. But being is also constantly becoming, and the kind of becoming I have to do is crushing, agonizing work. It is work specifically meant to pull apart systems that structure every part of my life. There is a strange saltbitter comfort in feeling the weight of it, in knowing nothing is sacred — because it means everything must change.

---

Parting words—

• Donate to the Oluwatoyin Salau Freedom Fighters Fund (if you are a Black girl activist in need, the next round of applications opens in July).

• Read this piece by Clarkisha Kent honoring Toyin and grieving her, as a fellow Black woman.

• If you’re interested, here’s a brief visual overview of Heidegger’s work and more on his concept of being-in-the-world.

collage honoring Oluwatoyin Salau by Broobs Marquez

still lifes of still living

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.

a shelter we make

There is an image that keeps coming back to me lately: a science-fair volcano, the bubble and froth of baking soda and vinegar overflowing. Not because I remember making one — although I’m sure I did at some point.

The summer I turned freshly teenaged, there was a hot still afternoon when my father said something that sent me yelling and crying through the house — I don’t even remember what, but I knew and still know my reaction was out of proportion. When he came to find me after I’d simmered, he knelt and said gently, You’re like a volcano. You take in everything, and you keep all those feelings to yourself, but eventually they have nowhere to go. So you explode.

I’ve done a lot of searching over many years for healthier ways to channel what I feel, to keep those overflows few and far between. It has taken conscious effort, sometimes fighting against impulses that reach deep into the woodgrain of me. I have to choose it: choose to be vulnerable with the people in my life, choose habits like journaling, choose to face conflict and not run from it, choose to seek out help when I have no resources left. Some of it has worked: I’m not the pressure cooker I once was.

But I feel the rumblings more and more lately. You take in everything, my father said, and lately everything is, well, a lot. There is just so much. The periods of dormancy in me shrink faster than I can take a breath.

---

One morning last week, I woke to find I couldn’t. Breathe, that is. I watched the clock tick from six-thirty to seven to eight, trying to take a deep breath and feeling the weight like a river stone on my chest when I did, my pulse skyrocketing with the effort.

The two days before that morning were some of the worst of this spring: I had had the proverbial rug pulled out from under me and was in danger of losing my apartment, having to move out in the middle of the pandemic. I’d had a handful of meltdowns, a furious mad dash of strategizing, and the single most stressful phone call of my life. And — with willpower, a script, and a lot of restraint to avoid screaming — I’d managed to band-aid the situation, temporarily. My household congratulated me on how well I handled it. With grace, was the phrase they used.

Grace seemed to elude me that morning. By that point not being able to take a breath had scared me into weeping. I was terrified that the stress and panic had been too much for me at last, that this was my body giving out. I sat rod-straight in bed, facing the window, watching the sun come up over the trees, still weeping. Grace, I thought, would be seeing a morning after this one.

I spent four days with that terror, with my pulse hammering every time I even stood up, the river stone lodged in my ribs, pain shooting through different parts of my body as if in protest. My anxiety is a fellow at this point, a shadow, I know it well. But it’s also a shapeshifter, so I can’t explain it any better than this: it felt different, this time. It felt like some kind of end coming.

Some parts of the story are better not told, so I won’t tell you what changed the tide. But on the fifth day, though the weight was still there when I woke, I knew this time that I was safe, from this, for now. But I also had to reckon with the violence that the events of my life routinely wreak on me, that my brain and body had wrought on each other.

---

My therapist surprises me when I relate the week to her: She calls me sensitive. Not sneering with her nose upturned; she sounds almost admiring. She calls it my blessing, and my curse, to feel everything so intensely. Her eyes shine out gently over our video call. Feeling this much means you are alive.

I know she is trying to comfort me, but I can’t help thinking of a friend of mine, a conversation we had weeks ago. (Was it weeks? Time is a rubber band, constricting and stretching.) Everything is different, and nothing is different, my friend said. She meant that she can’t distinguish her feelings from one another, experiences everything the same. She meant: outside looks so different, but in here it’s fog. She meant: emotional flatline.

Is she less alive than me, just because feeling is hard for her right now? That seems unfair.

When we first spoke, I wondered whether I would swap my experience for hers. But it’s like the old question: would you rather be deaf or blind? — a ridiculous proposal, so incredibly insensitive that I feel embarrassed by it.

It’s not until my friend and I speak again weeks later that something changes. It’s probably my brain protecting me, she says. Like, if I actually try to process everything all at once, I’ll go insane.

A spark goes off in my brain when she says it. Of course: everything is terrifying right now. Everything is something that our brains want to protect us from. For some that means shutting down to stay safe, crumpling feelings down because they are just too raw, too much. For others it’s just the opposite — revving into overdrive by predicting every terrible scenario and honing in on every strange sensation.

But that’s what it is, the thread between us. We are our own shelter. We are trying to protect ourselves. From the threat always simmering, the rumbles waiting to break forth, the skies darkening with ash.

---

Knowing this, I am not suddenly immune to stress and anxiety, and my friend does not magically regain her emotional spectrum. But when I recognize it as a protective instinct rather than an attack, I make room for some lines to be drawn.

We are living through a crisis, and there will be overlapping crises within this one, to be managed as they come up. But if I can be sensitive to looming threats and the terror they give me, I can also be sensitive to the things that bring me calm, or pleasure, or outright laughter. If I can’t take a breath some mornings, I can stick my nose in a blooming bush and catch its earth-sweet scent. If I spend the day sobbing every other hour, there are still hours between them to make good simple food, and read old comic books out in the yard, and call my friends. Both falling ash and clear sky.

You take in everything, my father said. I can make that true again.

what we can't see

I haven’t read a book cover to cover in a long time. It’s a little embarrassing, as someone who read voraciously when I was younger — an entire book in a single day, sometimes a few hours. Now I tend to pick up old favorites and thumb to any old page, read a handful of pages over breakfast or in an empty stretch of day-off afternoon. Whatever I have attention for.

Today I finished Madeline Miller’s Circe. Those who had to read the classics in school will likely remember Circe the way she appears in Homer’s Odyssey: an island-bound sorceress, who first turns Odysseus’ crew into pigs, but relents after he confronts her and allows the men to stay on her island of Aiaia for a year. There is so much I could say about this book, from the depth of Circe as a character to its relation to and departure from myth (I’m a bit of a Greek myth obsessive). But I keep coming back to Circe’s island, and her divinity.

In Miller’s book, Circe is exiled to Aiaia by her father, the sun god Helios, after admitting to using her powers of witchcraft on a fellow nymph. It’s a punishment fit for an immortal: while her island has forests and hills for her to explore, and her house is beautiful and never empty of food, she cannot leave its shores. She’s destined to spend most of eternity alone, except for rare visitors. Let’s be clear: visitors in ancient stories are seldom the kind or welcome sort, and Circe is not spared in that sense. There is a reason she begins to turn men into pigs. But she doesn’t start that way: she starts eager for any news beyond Aiaia, and offering help (however weary) and sustenance (however simple) to those who come asking.

A few days ago, a friend offered to run an errand and stop by my mother’s house, where I’ve been staying since coming safely out of quarantine. In many ways I’m lucky: we don’t lack for food, and there’s a yard big enough to walk around. But the house is on a main road, and I don’t currently drive, which means I can’t help out my family like I’d like to. Taking a walk is risky at best with so many cars, and because our county's rate of infection is the state's highest. All this considered, I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing a friendly face outside my too-familiar walls. So imagine my delight, the way my heart leapt, seeing not one but four friends traipse into the driveway at midday like merry messengers. It was mixed with a little fear, primal, my body’s natural reaction to seeing anyone not of my household these days. This, I thought, is what Circe must have felt, the first time a ship dragged up onto Aiaia’s shores.

Our friends had our bag of errands, bless them, but it was an even better prize just to see them in the flesh, standing the required six feet away. The weather was good for once, so we decided we could sit out in the yard with them, all of us prudently masked. I didn’t realize how long we had been out there until my mother poked her head out and asked, with that worried tone mothers have, whether any of them wanted coffee, something to eat. Within minutes she brought out a tray and slid it onto the grass between us. We talked and laughed and swapped news for another hour at least, keeping our mandated distance, moving with the sun across the yard.

When they finally left, I felt strangely lost. The still water of my days had felt rare ripples for a few hours, and now all had settled again. My mother’s delicate espresso tasses sat abandoned in the grass, their daintiness thrown into shadow against the not-yet-spring of new moss and old pine. Something unnameable bloomed in my chest to see it. So much weight in such delicate things. All my longing, balanced on a fragile rim.

---

Later that same day, maybe sensing my heartache, my mother suggested we go for a drive to a quiet coastal town where she knew we could walk undisturbed. It was the first time I had ventured further than a few blocks from where I was sleeping in a month. Anxiety battered my ribcage with every step from the car. Every time I saw a person approaching, I flinched, and hated it. My breath felt shallow behind my mask. Every time my mother pointed out a flower or a slope down to the water I barely answered, tensed for possible dangers up the road.

My moments of respite came when there was no one else in sight. All I could look at was what was in front of me. A curve of road through bare unbloomed trees, their limbs crisp against clear sunlit sky. A marshy expanse, a lone egret standing in the slow-moving current. I felt, in those deserted tableaux, a wonder that I can only relate to childhood: look at this color, this shape, look at the way the world is. It felt like cold water slicing through me, waking me up. I felt a strange relief: even as so much of our world and our daily lives are dramatically changed, there is plenty that doesn’t change, that continues without us. The trees waiting to bloom, and the egret, and the waters flowing through the marsh. If only I could be a thing like that, I thought. If only our lives didn’t have to change quite so much.

That night, I picked up Circe again. I came to a passage where Circe is looking over Aiaia, its every detail she knows so well, from the poplar trees to the cormorants circling the waves. “Mortals like to name such natural wonders changeless, eternal, but the island was always changing, that was the truth, flowing endlessly through its generations,” she muses. “Three hundred years and more had passed since I had come. … Even the cliffs were different, carved by the rain and wind, by the claws of countless scrabbling lizards, by the seeds that stuck and sprouted in their cracks. Everything was united by the steady rise and fall of nature’s breath. Everything except for me.”

I stared at the page. Truly it felt like witchcraft, Circe coming through the pages to slap me in the face. At first it seemed a reproach for me: of course things change, don’t be stupid, you are not the center of the world. But then I reread that last line, felt the yearning in it. The ache to move, act, breathe differently when you’re unable to. Isn’t there freedom, and privilege, in being able to change at all?

Reading Circe, you get the sense that the titular goddess sees her eternal life as one of endurance and suffering. But narrators are unreliable: it is my favorite thing about them. They tell us their story, but they tell us more in how they act. Circe is tough, no question — she has to be. But she has an undeniable soft spot for mortals: for their company, their love even. Over the course of the story, it is pointed out several times that Circe’s voice sounds like a mortal’s — an undesirable similarity for a goddess. As the book goes on, you get the sense that closeness to humanity might actually be her strength. Each piece of news she gets from the world beyond Aiaia, each visitor she offers a cup of wine in her halls, affects her deeply one way or another. Even if she can’t change (and that’s not guaranteed), she wants to.

All her longing, balanced on a fragile rim.

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I am no goddess; I am hardly in exile. But I don’t think it’s dramatic to say this period of isolation feels eternal. Every day bleeds so easily into the next — they feel like weeks and months of their own. And always, the fear — of anyone outside, of the microscopic thing I can’t see that is taking lives and grinding the gears of the world to a stop. It’s easy to feel like nothing changes, that we will be stuck forever in the mire.

But if Circe saw anything in her centuries-long exile, it is that change happens constantly, and often so slowly that we don’t see it. After a tumble from the window took an entire vine off my houseplant two months ago, there’s a tiny push of growth at the stem. My anxiety is chronic and my bad days are still bad, but the constant pressure in my chest from the first two weeks of reading the news has dwindled. I can’t promise that all change is good, but it happens. And that means that this moment in time is changing, too. One day we will wake up and the world will look different than it does right now.

So we savor the small divergences of our days — friendly faces, patches of sunlight, a chore finished. We do what we can do. We trust that the wave of change we can’t see yet is coming, and we hope that we can push it to the right shores.

May it take much less than three hundred years.

(Stay safe, stay healthy, stay inside.)