Summer 2020
It’s been seven years since my dad died, since it felt like all of New York became inundated in an unfathomable grief, since I’ve tried to wrestle myself away from that metaphor, from always drowning and gulping and sinking.
I’ve often succeeded.
I’ve turned to metaphors of plants and suns and earth. I’ve moved to California and lost my sea legs and it feels good not to need them. I’ve had two children, one removed from my belly with a knife and one birthed in a roar of pain and after a hard day of labor. If love-math were simple then it would seem I have more love in my life than I had lost, but love math is not simple. There is still a deficit, despite the abundance.
Now we are six months into the global pandemic and I am saturated with anxiety and anger that the only metaphors available to me are the old standbys. Here I am drowning again.
Because when they say the word ventilator on the news I am in white hot pain and back in the worst moment of my life. Every time they count the dead I feel the birth math we etch on tombstones- each birthday was a Mother’s day of labor or of separation from the womb. The fear of respiratory illness is so much more acute for me, for anyone who has watched someone struggle to breath, and then stop, and then be jolted and tricked into breathing and then fail. This is happening a thousand times a day right now in the US alone, a thousand babies dying alone. When I read Jesmyn Ward’s beautiful essay about watching her beloved die, I felt the familiar electrical numbness radiate from my fingers to the rest of me as my senses withdrew from the world. Sometimes it lasts for a few hours but I’ve been here since reading it a few days ago. I’m still sitting with that recognition of wishing someone back to life while watching them descend quickly in the other direction.
If I were a machine, I’d be a strange multi-chambered pressure love cooker. Taking in air and creating heat and love and expelling steam and whistling or exploding. This may seem like an innocuous things, but those boys in Boston turned pressure cookers into bombs and removed limbs and lives from the world. Their simple machine made death. Harnessing the power of air, of wind, of power can be useful. But it can be dangerous.
A game of would you rather, except we are not in seventh grade playing with thrilling hypotheticals anymore. It’s 2020 and we are dealing with climate devastation on two of our three coasts. Wildfires and smoke where the land meets the Pacific, Hurricanes coming one after another and then hovering heavily for too long floodinging too much over the gulf - they are afraid this year they will run out of names for them.The hurricane and wildfire seasons have some early, threatening to stay late.
Who knew it was coming when in small groups at school we peered over our knees to see who would respond and how, would you rather be burned alive or drown? The options no longer would-you-rathers in a fun game, but fears in the chests of millions. Now, both options are here, lungs swelling and closing or lungs imploding. You’re either underwater or on fire. And the virus is somehow both of those things at once.
My dad explained to me that when I’m sailing I never need to feel like I’m not in control. That no matter how fast I’m going and how scared I am I can always let the sails go slack, stop harnessing the wind, and all that power and inertia will slow and eventually stop.Once I was holding the steering wheel and the roar of wind in the sails was so loud and the land loomed closer and closer and my shoulders tensed and I looked around for help and my eyes found him imitating me holding the wheel, all tensed up. He held the position for a beat and then tilted his head back to make a poof sound and lifted his hands off the imaginary wheel. Just let go he mouthed. As I did, the boat groaned as the sails went slack. We turned with the wind and the water and all was still. Long Island close and calm next to us.
It is the same with the forces that propel our lives forward into certain directions, the society we live in and the culture we uphold. It feels like we have to hold on to the direction we are going, until we don’t.
To me the word resistance implies hard work. We need to resist the status quo, resist the powers of white supremacy and patriarchy. But maybe we are thinking of it wrong. Maybe the world we live in feels so hard because we are resisting the natural ways of things. Like trying to slick down a wayward lock of hair on a boy's head which will always find it’s way over his forehead, eventually. Maybe resistance is easier than we think. Maybe it’s just letting go of the power we give to those who have it. Maybe we just need the wind and water to do it’s thing, let the sails go slack. Let the steering wheel turn with the tide, let the whole boat spin out. Let us stop searching for old metaphors for how our lives and bodies and minds feel broken and realize it’s the systems oppressing us which are broken, our perfect selves are just waiting for us to wake up and take our own power back.