2020 in Pandemic

I searched all day for a way to arrange these past five months into something that made sense. I sat down at my computer three times and closed my laptop three times.

But the only thing that comes to mind is “2020 is midnight blue.” The sky outside my bedroom window is dark and endless, with a waxy moon tacked to it. Night in the country has always magnified my loneliness, been a reminder that my existence is fleeting and my motion is stagnant.

It is a year marked by trauma and grief. The pandemic that loomed over my brother’s wedding in India, that cut my time there short and continues to hold my brother and his wife hostage there. The abrupt, but hopefully not final, ending of my life in San Francisco. There was the delayed mourning of my relationship, without the possibility of distraction—no friends to go out with, no hookups to pursue, no drinks, no parties, no people to meet.

There was the devastation of the BLM protests, the police brutality on camera that went unchecked. Rubber bullets shot into eyes, pepper spray at point-blank range, screaming for equality, and the constant reminder that people of color are dying disproportionately, and alone, in hospital beds, in heartbreaking conditions, being cared for by increasingly desensitized workers. Ants were crawling all over people as they died, I remember a nurse wrote about a hospital in Texas.

They’re brown people, I have thought so many times. Nobody cares, because they’re not white.

When Trump was elected in 2016, I remember wondering how many people would die because of him. I’m not sure what I thought, but it certainly wasn’t hundreds of thousands. It should be a collective grief, but the devastating deaths of so many people is somehow being contested.

There is the absence of physical touch. I cuddle my parents’ dog sometimes. And in bed, I drift to sleep hugging a chunk of my comforter. My family is not a family of huggers. I guess the last time I hugged someone was when I was at the airport in Chandigarh, in India and said bye to my brother. I don’t know that I’d ever really hugged him before, but I cried and I hugged him for a long time, and I think everyone thought I was being dramatic, but all I know is that he’s been stuck in India since then, and thousands of people are dying every day.

But what also been devastating has been the way this time—the virus and the protests—has revealed who people really are, and in a way that makes it apparent that we aren’t so unlike the people of the past, the people who committed horrific acts against other humans, the Nazis and the sympathizers.

A fairly good friend of mine is protesting the lockdowns, not because she doesn’t think the virus is real, but because she thinks it’s time the vulnerable and at-risk start sacrificing themselves:

I believe in wearing masks, limiting socializing, staying distant from other people in public, etc… but I will no longer support the ruining of people’s lives, livelihood, and mental health. I believe that we should be doing everything we can within realistic reason to protect our elderly and at risk, but that will no longer come at the expense of young and healthy people who may never financially or emotionally recover from this devastating setback. Death is the end of every single life. The lack of acceptance of this, is causing the means of the collective common people to live a decent life to disintegrate. Will we wait for the supply chains to completely dry up before we take a stand? Not me. And I hope you won’t either.

I didn’t write a response, and I don’t know if I should, but holy what the fuck is that.

2020 is a year of loss.