In those days, we woke with bedheads and foggy eyes and boggy brains, comfy in our slept-in yoga pants as we headed to the kitchen to make our pot of coffee, our go-to prop for endless hours of video conferences with others, also at home, also in yoga pants they’d slept in, mewling toddlers and barking dogs in the next room.
Those days, we positioned the computer monitor to cut off our chins so colleagues couldn’t see us play Two Dots or Minecraft or stream CNN or NPR on our phones; often, we typed in the chat box ‘iffy Wi-Fi’, turnedoff the video, and did downward dogs, washed dishes in the kitchen, took shits in the loo, walked the dog in the park, or took our lunch in the garden.
Those days, we slept in bedlinens upgraded to organic 800 count cotton and silk-lined weighted blankets to hug us in our dreams; we napped at our desks, on the living room couch, in hammocks on our decks, hammocks we didn’t use as much as we wanted but knowing they swung gently in breezy sunshine reminded us, briefly, of longer days at the ocean serenaded by singing seagrass, the keening gulls, the clean ozonated air.
In those days, we jockeyed for sidewalk rights with runners and bikers and electric scooters; we walked fast, to get our shrinking hearts to pump again, to break a sweat, to feel the heady rush of our breath re-inhaled through masks, and then, the cool release when, safe at home, we ripped them off, gasping.
In those days, respite came when our Apple Watch chimed 5 pm, and we replaced caffeine with Cabernet or gin-and-lime and/or a joint and sat outside in the garden or swung in that now less sunny hammock, and sometimes, something nudged our mind or heart and we wrote it down or, more likely, contemplated writing down the small thought that came unbidden, but mostly we worried about what to cook for dinner, those ceaseless meals, and because we didn’t often foray into the world, we had to work with what still-good greens and proteins languished in the fridge.
Those days, when the sun circled to the other side of the earth or, rather, the earth shifted enough to leave us in darkness again, we gathered our greens and proteins into a bowl, doused them with sriracha—we craved sensation of any type—and filled our glass again and sat on the couch.
In those nights, we streamed Netflix and Hulu and Prime—we’d never realized the variety of true crime dramas and cooking competitions and murder documentaries and porn—and between the substances and the carbs and the hum of the tube, sometimes that thought would crash again against the edges of our brain and noodle through it, a slinking worm.
Those nights, we flipped to Animal Planet and ratcheted up the volume; we relished the violence of the lioness’ take-down of the gazelle, the shark’s feeding frenzy, the queen bee’s deadly mating ritual, and our favorite episode, the one where lemmings migrate en masse across the tundra, diving from Alaskan cliffs into the solace of water smashing into rocks. After the fourteen-minute scene, we sat in silence for a moment, awed at the momentousness of the lemmings’ foolish mistake, at the little creatures’ persistence in going forward despite the risks of ending it all, and we wondered to ourselves, Don’t they realize they’re drowning? In those nights, we answered ourselves the same way—with a shrug—and we turned off the television and the lights and, with phones in hand, we mounted the stairs to our expensively-sheeted beds and doom-scrolled ourselves to sleep.