Apocalypse Cabaret Diary, March 29
For the last few days, I have been floating on a kind of opium cloud of lovely, long, intimate, phone calls. It has sustained me, though it has felt less like having a healthy life and more like taking a beautiful narcotic to get me through the pain of a fracture. It was less like “being intimate” and more like having intimacy injected directly into my veins.
Last night something broke where it shouldn’t have. Or maybe it just shouldn’t have broken so quickly. I don’t know.
“Until now, I always knew that the right answer was to push you,” she said. “You always lived up to the moment. Now, I admit it, I don’t know, and that’s very uncomfortable.”
I hadn’t realized it either, but it’s true. I am used to having a kind of emotional invulnerability. A lot of that went away as I pushed myself out of solitude, and it needed to go, but I still reacted well to emotional dangers and difficult situations. I could take a punch. I could rise to a challenge. I was resilient in ways that let me lend it to other people who were themselves struggling to be resilient.
Now, all of that is spent keeping myself from breaking down in solitude. It’s been working, but I can’t handle additional system pressures. And so, going through the rituals of a complicated and difficult relationship, I snapped before I even realized I was fragile.
It took the opium cloud with it. And so I fell to earth.
It’s one thing to fall to earth when you can dust yourself off and go exploring. Maybe even be pulled back up on to your feet by people around you.
It’s another to crash land in solitude.
Certain kinds of pain project themselves into the past and the future if they’re not addressed in the present. You start to think “it has always been this way, and will always be this way.” Pain enlarges the present by killing memory and imagination.
More people have begun to have conversations about the oncoming death toll. Before it was more of an abstraction, something that had enough distance in space and time that it felt impersonal. It was literally news reports from far away places, which triggered a kind of vague compassion and concern.
Now, people are starting to know people who have been tested, and diagnosed, and wondering when their hospitals are going to be overrun. Now it’s personal.
If news reports are to be believed, many red states are now viewing many blue states the way many blue states used to view China and Italy.
Part of this is a complete failure of compassion. Part of it is uncertainty about how to react to something we’ve never seen before. None of us have been through a pandemic, and so we are not sure what it really means to hear that people in distant places are experiencing one.
Much of life is a failure of imagination that lasts until we go through the experience.
My apartment, my physical environment, is slowly breaking down. Dishes are piling up for no good reason. I need to vacuum, and I haven’t. But more significant and disconcerting is the way in which memories seem to be spilling out from my body and filling up the small space I walk in.
Here’s one. This comes up sometimes:
The first time I ever traveled the world alone, without a fixed schedule, I would be constantly out among people, but would go days, sometimes a whole week, without having a conversation in English. (Which meant without having a real conversation at all.)
Occasionally, after particularly long stretches without conversation, I would bump into someone in a similar predicament, and we would have long, inane, conversations, just for the sake of doing it. They weren’t good conversations, these were rarely people I had anything except language and geography in common with, but we needed to talk.
After one of these particularly long, particularly stupid, conversations, I came to think of the English language as my homeland. It became what I was homesick for. I had encountered literary theory that talked about this before, but I had never been able to actually imagine what it meant until I experienced it. And so, for a while, when people asked where I was from, I would say: “the English language.”
Here’s another memory. This has been coming up a lot, which is a very bad sign:
Some years ago, a close friend got married. They had their wedding outdoors, but couldn’t figure out where in the city to have the reception which they wanted to be a rager of a late night event. At the time, I knew a girl who knew a guy who was running a fixer-upper art gallery and performance space in SoMa, and got him to agree to host the reception basically at cost. It was in a terrible part of town, but, it was so much space for so little money — it was going to be a hell of a party.
And it was. Proud of myself for helping to make this happen, surrounded by friends, celebrating the union of people I loved, I let myself loose in the moment. I got way too drunk. I celebrated. I sang. Someone who really, really, shouldn’t have made out with me.
We closed the place down. Those of us who were left called two taxis (this was before rideshare was really a thing) to come pick us all up. Thoroughly trashed, I lingered a moment in the space to say thank you to the manager for accommodating all this, and then I stumbled, literally stumbled, out into the street. The massive wooden doors of the space closed and locked behind me. I oriented myself and got my legs to step towards the cabs … and they both pulled away. Gone. Without me.
I tried to take in my surroundings. I pounded on the doors, but there was no response. I was too drunk to adequately work my phone. I was standing outside, in a suit, in a rough part of town, late at night. Alone. Seriously impaired.
It was, in so many ways, a perfect metaphor for my life. Look at what I had done. Look at how much I had contributed to the happiness of people I cared for. And when I let myself go for a moment, look how I had ended up. This was not the first, or even the most embittering, time this had happened. It was just a perfect, transparent, symbol of the dynamic. This, in all its complexity, is my eternal present.
Of course, a few days later, I would be asked “hey, where’d you go?” And be told that it wasn’t personal, that I wasn’t abandoned, that everyone had just assumed I was in the other cab, and no one had checked.
Fuck them. Fuck anyone who tries to explain that to me. I know that. I understand that it’s true. Fuck you all anyway. If you think that’s the point, you’ve never been abandoned to danger by people who say they love you.
That memory looms large for me right now. And when I say “it has always been like that, and it will always be like that,” it is my capacity to imagine a better future growing sickly inside of me.
And don’t you dare — you reading this, you personally — don’t you DARE tell me that it’s not true, or that you wouldn’t have done that, or that you’re here for me. Don’t even start saying that. Stop thinking it, right now.
Because you’re not. That’s the point. You’re not here. No one is here. No one was there then, and no one is here now.
And even if you were, you wouldn’t know what to do. No one thought to ask after me back when it would have mattered. No one had anything to say, after I had rescued myself and someone had bothered to notice I was missing and check in, that brought me even the remotest comfort. On the contrary, everything they tried to say only made it worse.
Don’t tell me you love me. Everyone in those cabs had said it to me that night. It changed nothing. It is insulting when people who abandon you say they love you. It diminishes both love and the magnitude of what they’ve done.
The sad truth — the truth that I’d hoped was changing, but is instead an eternal recurrence — is that I am better at being alone than anyone is at being with me. The rest of my life just follows.
Don’t tell me this is bullshit. I already know that. If I were thinking rationally, I wouldn’t have to write this. I’m trying to drain the poison. Your trite well wishes and empty gestures of support only push it back in. And then all I can do is spit it at you. If you cannot come up with something to help that is as intense and powerful and compelling as that moment was, you do not belong here right now.
I am going to do now what I had to do then. Think as clearly as I can in a moment where I cannot possibly think clearly. Put one foot in front of the other, stumble in the direction of safety, and hope to God that I don’t come across something genuinely malicious, because I cannot defend myself right now. And hope to God I don’t stumble over my feet, because if I fall down I cannot stand up again right now. And anything — anything — ugly I have to say about the world and the people in it and how much I hate you all right now simply because I keep having to do this and I wish to God it was different this time, all that is justified. At least in this moment.
Which is eternal. It is what has happened, and will happen, over and over again, because you and I both lack the imagination to get me out of it. Especially right now.
But if you catch me at the beginning, I will make a party for you. And if you catch me in the middle, I will be drunk and happy, and we will kiss for a long time, even though we shouldn’t. And you … you’ll get in the damn taxi. And as long as I didn’t love you too much, I’ll forgive you for it, and understand.
It’s actually a rich and complicated scenario, containing a lot of joy.
This part … though … this part …
