Why Are You Even Here Reading This?

Lilah Penner Brown

On my daily walk, I pass by a sign posted at the local bus stop. I feel sad every time I read it. “Why are you even here reading this?”. I understand their sentiment. We should be at home as much as possible. My county, so far, has been doing a good job obeying one of the longest stay- at-home orders in the country. This once-busy street has been quiet for two months.

My walk feels like an essential trip. It’s the one thing I’ve held onto as a constant in a time that seems more turbulent than any I can remember. I feel affronted when I read this sign even though I’m not planning to catch the bus. It’s a reminder of how abnormal the world has become.

More and more I question why I’m still in my neighborhood, reading the same sign over and over again. I question why it feels both like nothing is changing and that everything is changing catastrophically. We are all questioning now. Holding onto maybes and one days.

Every few weeks the tension builds to a crescendo and I find myself crying over small things like the fact that I’ve somehow lost the ability to properly boil soup. I’m supposed to be in class, but my dad has asked me to make him Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Although he’s finally left self-isolation, he isn’t allowing himself to use anything in the kitchen. It still feels like he’s miles away sometimes, in a mode of paranoia that I can’t seem to break through no matter how hard I try. I can’t focus and I forget to add an extra can of water. He asks me to boil the soup a second time because he doesn’t know where the soup was made or what germs are in it. He says he knows this sounds crazy. Suddenly tears fill my eyes. The burner clicks. The soup finally comes to a rolling boil. As I hand him his soup, there’s a longer exchange between the two of us that feels too personal to articulate. He leaves, back to the room where’s he’s spent the last month alone. I lie down on the dirty kitchen rug and the room feels like it’s spinning. I’m crying but it feels disconnected to my thoughts, totally unbidden. I knock on the door to my younger brother’s room and ask him if I can just sit on the floor while he’s in geometry class. He holds my hand as his teacher takes attendance. I notice that I’m still crying but my mind is blank. The sadness is so deep it has reached inside me and stolen my thoughts. It has made me vacuous and hollow in ways that I’m still struggling to understand.

Why are you even here reading this, I think as the words of my psychology textbook jump around the page. Focusing my eyes feels like too much effort. There is little escape from these feelings of hopelessness. Television has only recently regained its appeal. Movies sometimes feel too long and immersive and leave me anxious, wanting a distraction from the distraction. It feels like there’s always something in my periphery, lurking around the corner, waiting and waiting.

I bake. Then I feel guilty for not baking anymore. The yeast runs out and I forget to feed my starter. Or I remember to feed my starter and choose not to. I’m ashamed that I can’t seem to stick to anything these days. I take pictures of flowers on my walks. I often feel like I want to have pictures of this time, but everything is too beautiful in the California springtime. There is nothing physically happening around me that feels as ugly as I do inside. That feels as ugly as the world is right now. The palm trees sway against the blue sky and a hummingbird perches on a telephone wire. There is pleasant bird song at all times. It feels perfect in the way I imagine 1950s white suburbia did. Gilded and queasy.

I spend an absurd amount of time staring at my computer. I’ve even started dreaming about Zoom calls. It was upsetting to learn that you can’t simulate eye contact over Facetime. That’s a little thing that I miss. Eye contact. Intimacy altogether is impoverished by the screen. Still, I’ll take whatever I can get.

I find myself reverting back to an old self here at home. Memories of childhood feel clearer, more real. I fall back into habits from high school but none of the good ones. Google Photos reminds me each day of where I was a year ago, two years ago, six years ago. The beach, a date, a birthday party.

The suffering of the world is immense and unfathomable. All-consuming except when it is not. I prioritize my own discomfort, my own sadness. At the urging of concerned love ones, I stop refreshing the New York Times upshot page. I fiddle with the dial of attention, trying to focus somewhere in the middle between my own feelings and the feelings of the world. It is a privilege to turn that dial at all.

There are no answers here yet. No vaccine. No masterplan. For me, God is silent. For others, a high power is speaking now, clearer than ever.

The world turns on. We try to fix the things we can control. We hope others fix the things that we cannot. We hope. We hope. We hope.