Death to Normal
There was a New York Times article in my inbox this morning about four years ago today: “Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic.”
The day before, I had decided to go home for spring break early from my school in NYC. It was the first and only time I ever up and left in the middle of a class. I recorded a lot of my Covid experience on my old blog (note the language change—I called it The Corona Diaries then but I haven't heard anyone use “Corona”to talk about Covid in years. Fascinating.). I figured today was a good time to repost a poem from that year. I originally wrote it about the pandemic but it took on new meaning that summer with the rising conversations about racial injustice in America.
Four years later—how are we doing? Did we learn anything lasting? Did I?
The worst tragedy of this: Some of us will come out unchanged. Whatever you must do to cope, don’t Strap a mask over the smile of death. Don’t sanitize normal life, Stripping it of the germs of callousness and distraction, The way we scrolled our days away, As if we were healthy then. Death to normal. Tear the veil that busyness drapes over us And see where we really stand: Beneath naked heaven, the weight of eternity bearing down, The light of a far country coming ever closer (We ignore it till our feet brush its shoreline––too late). That terrible smile, that consuming light, Face them now. Now, before The grim reaper of perceived normalcy takes us. Any death but that.
Thanks to C. S. Lewis for the “naked heaven” imagery and Andrew Peterson for the “far country” (which according to Wikipedia he stole from a 16th-century theologian—all art is borrowing!).
There are still times I step onto a crowded subway car and I remember how eerily empty they were when I first came back to NYC that fall. Not having tourists swarming everywhere was nice, I'll admit it, but it was also kind of sad. As annoying as they are, they're supposed to be here. Plus, they help fuel the economy and all that. And I still remember the first time I stepped on a subway car the next year and realized it felt close to normal again.
Whatever normal means.
It made me tear up, seeing all the people standing next together, feeling that invisible repellent force between us starting to fade, like we’d been warring poles of a magnet for so long and now at last the atoms were shifting to allow connection again.
For me, part of whatever “death to normal” looks like is more gratitude. How self-help-y of me, I know, but for real: Last night my roommates and I hosted an Oscars-viewing party, and as we laid out an extravagant charcuterie board, I thought how insane this would have been three years ago. Unthinkable. I remember trying to host school events in 2021 and making sure all the food was individually wrapped so that we wouldn't touch anything anyone else did. So that we would never overlap, never share too much of the same space.
Remembering that made last night all the sweeter. The juxtaposition of the fear then and the freedom now, the past isolation and the present community—I hope the wonder of it never leaves me. I hope it inspires me to keep pressing in, opening myself up to others, to the surprise guest, to the vulnerability of human touch.
I hope, too, to remember the good things of those initial months of the pandemic (which is more what this poem is really about). How silly productivity seemed, the ceaseless grind we accepted and championed, and for what? What did it matter about your quotas or your portfolio when you hadn’t hugged someone in weeks, when people you loved stopped breathing, when you reckoned with what would happen if infrastructures collapsed? Even if many of our policies or reactions were more hysterical than rational, I think it’s good every once in a while for comfortable Westerners to confront these things. I hope I can remember what felt important when the assumption that everything will always be how it has been was stripped away.
In Other Words…
So this is looking like it's going to be a monthly thing now, posting on here. I have to be extra careful as I heal from a tendonitis flare-up. But I'm so grateful that this space exists and that you all are here whenever I can show up.
Oh, and I finally caught up on my Goodreads reviews! Look at all these beauties:
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler (4 stars; reread) | Red Rising by Pierce Brown (4 stars) | Golden Son by Pierce Brown (4 stars) | Morning Star by Pierce Brown (5 stars—my first of the year!) | Self-Made: Creating Our identities from da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton (4 stars) | Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (3.5 stars) | Trust by Henry Cloud (4 stars)
to awakening,
Aberdeen