Winter
Jen Silvermanagain, closing in like a hard dusk. It is November of 2020. They’re counting the votes and whatever lies ahead is a prediction we have all made in so many different ways in the past twenty-four hours. Yesterday morning we drove up the Taconic, and the leaves had turned burgundy and brown, a quieting down of October’s eager crimson and orange. I’ve never owned a house before. I never thought I could own anything. When I imagined myself as older than I was, I was always alone and I was always in an airport. This house is a farmhouse from the 1800s, renovated to hold out the cold, to fill itself with light. Sometimes I wonder what it saw, when it imagined itself into the future. Burly New England farmers filling its flanks, perhaps, not something like me. Would it even have looked at me and known what I was? Not-man not-woman, or not quite, not enough, with my hair lopped badly and my sleeve of tattoos and no skirt, no apron, anywhere in sight. We pull into the gravel driveway; it is afternoon; dusk not yet here, light bouncing off the East-facing windows; and the votes are being counted.
Reflection is something that a lot of people have said they’re trying to use this time to do more of. I am trying to do less. I am trying to see my self nowhere. I am trying to understand the firm boundaries between individual and community. It is hard to parse the relationship between self and community without dwelling on the
self. I have started imagining myself as a small stone at the bottom of something.
Reflective Surfaces include steel, glass, water, and some types of stone.
Other Types of Stone
There is a small patch of gravelly weeds at a diagonal to the Farmhouse, fenced in by low wooden slats. Apparently the deer jump it with ease whenever they feel like it, but it’s been years since there was anything inside the fenced square that would compel them to jump. My partner, D, wants to plant a garden. This past year has washed away both his theatre jobs and mine, and then the industry itself, in its relentless tsunami of losses. D gazes at the withered patch with his keen gray eyes; he is imagining worlds; he is imagining shapes and colors and textures; he is imagining summer.
Fantasies
It’s hard to have any, anymore. Either cultural, political, or sexual.
Sex
I don’t know anybody who’s having it. “I could have fucked through a bad presidency,” a friend said back in April. “But now there’s just too much to try to get it up.”
Sex 2
In my early 20s, I remedied a painful break-up with a few swift months of online dating. This was when it was still a fairly new concept, and I felt very daring. For the purposes of the internet,
I listed my preferences as women-only; though I like both, men require real-life vetting lest you end up murdered or saddled with bedbugs. Bekah and Eli were a sweet pair of newlyweds who emailed me from a joint account to see if I’d want to date them. They had matching curly brown hair and scholarly spectacles, and they lived in a brownstone. I asked: Do you mean a threesome? No no, Eli replied, they were thinking that, if we all clicked, it would be a relationship: ongoing, kind, with a commitment to transparency and rigorous communication. I remember thinking: What kind of a fantasy life is that?
Communication
The opposite of which is not silence, but rather: misinformation.
Misinformation
I now live in a world in which, if I had a fantasy, it would be transparency and rigorous communication.
Fantasies
It’s hard to have any, anymore. Either cultural, political, or sexual.
Politics
Imagine two eels, covered in mud, stuffed into the same bucket.
Culture
Now imagine that the bucket has a leak.
Water
Now we are waiting for the votes to be counted and there are protestors protesting the ballot counting and there are protestors
who are protesting the protestors who are protesting the ballot counting, and around three p.m. today I asked myself if it was too early for a drink. I did not mean water.
Waiting
There are many types of waiting, but very few of them are good.
Waiting 2
In the early days of the pandemic, mere weeks before New York became the epicenter, a family member began having headaches and fatigue. We took her to a neurologist for an MRI. When the nurses called her name, they cautioned us that the exam room would be small, so I stayed in the waiting room. The fluorescent light was a flat lemon wash everywhere except the fish tank in the corner, which was shot through with a lurid pink glow. I couldn’t see the source, but it created the impression of a tiny fish brothel in the middle of rigorous banality. I tried not to touch the sticky wooden arms of the chair on which I was sitting, and I tried not to breathe too deeply. This was before masks, this was before we understood enough or even a little. I balanced my laptop on my knees. I checked my phone repeatedly, obsessively, for the nothing that was happening. Nothing continued. I realized that what I was doing was waiting. When I feel what it is to wait, now, everything takes on that flat barren glow.
Medicine
My best friend is a doctor in San Francisco. We have known each other since our first day of high school; I had stumbled in from a childhood lived in a disconnected grab-bag of countries, the last being Finland, and she had moved to the United States many years earlier from China. We lived together after college for a time, first
in a ramshackle house in Brookline, then—after the roof fell in—a big old house in Harvard Square. All of our housemates were MDPhD students, and when we had dinners together at night, they would give me details from their long days: who had gotten to do a particularly cool surgery; who had accidentally stepped in the organ bucket during a dissection. There were dinners, there were romances. A haematologist in training took us to a party where he draped his leather-jacketed arm over my shoulder as he steered me through the crowds; later we danced and he spun me around the floor. Now whenever I go to see a doctor, I sit on the waxy sheet of paper that covers the exam chair and as they present me with somber and authoritative faces, I imagine their previous lives as med students: cooking, dancing, sex.
Medicine 2
In the days leading up to the election, my best friend texts me: “I have to cling firmly to a belief that all people have intrinsic value, although recently more of my white male patients have been making anti-Asian comments, which is difficult.”
Intrinsic Value
Sometimes I ask myself if I believe that life has intrinsic value. My brain says No, No I Do Not. Value is what you make. If you make no value of your life, how can your life have value? Value is not the same as a right to exist. Everyone has a right to exist. You also have a right to make no value.
Intrinsic Value 2
I can’t kill moths or beetles or spiders; I carry them outside in jars. Bats and flying squirrels are currently living in the attic of this old farmhouse; when I lie awake at three a.m., four a.m., I hear their
tiny feet skittering across the ceiling above my head. They, like me, are nocturnal. Life has no intrinsic value and yet we’ve paid an exorbitant amount to have a one-way exit tube shoved into their entry hole, so that, when they go out hunting, they will evict themselves. When every bat and every flying squirrel is gone, the tube-owners will seal up the hole, and no harm will have befallen our former tenants. I have no leg to stand on, my beliefs and my actions do not match and I have no strength to adjust either.
Beliefs and Actions
My best friend says: “I eat cake for breakfast now, it’s a fucked-up time.”
Intrinsic Value 3
I am asking myself: what, precisely, do I believe has intrinsic value? Truthfulness, I think. Speaking what is true, and not what is false.
But why?
Because false things are smokescreen, obfuscation. They distract. Or worse, they colonize your mind, they repopulate your landscape with what is Not instead of what Is.
But so what?
Being filled with lies is like being filled with ghosts, you lose your grasp on the world, you become a ghost.
But so what?
Isn’t it better to be a person than a ghost?
But why?
Water 2
I asked myself if it was too early for a drink. I did not mean water.
All Sides of A Question
It takes me a long time to understand things that are easy for most other people. If you want me to use the espresso machine, I will stand in front of it for whole minutes, my finger poised over the tiny button with the icon of two cups. If you want me to run over to the parking meter and add another hour with the credit card, I will study it from all angles before I have inserted the card. This does not make daily life efficient, but if you are not in my daily life—if you are poised on the brink of a major decision like leaving your job or your marriage—I am the perfect person for you to call. I will study all sides of the question.
Marriage
was not legal for gay couples in my formative years. I dated men, women and people who were uninvested in the gender binary, and state-sanctioned marriage was not a thing I took seriously to any degree. Now that I am life-partnered with a cis-man, it has still been hard to understand why I need the state to weigh in on the degree of our commitment. During the first year of the pandemic, two of our friends got married. “Just in case,” they said, and a lightbulb went off in my head. I understand Just In Case. I come from a lineage of Swiss, Germans, and Jews: Just In Case—loaded with undercurrents of anxiety and dread—lives in my DNA. On the morning of Election Day, as COVID caseloads surged across the country, I googled gold wedding bands and tried to guess D’s ring size.
Ring Size
The internet says: “If you would like to secretly measure your partner’s ring size, wait until he is asleep and then tie a ribbon around his finger.” This is both a ridiculous suggestion, and a presumptive one. I am struck by the assumed male pronoun. Is it only a man who would need to have his ring finger measured in secret? Why a ribbon instead of a measuring tape?
Woman
is a designation that I am and am not. That I hold and don’t hold. That I understand and don’t understand. A series of assumptive shared experiences that rarely but occasionally align with my own. A way of living in your body that is often not the way I live in my body. The twenty-year olds share their pronouns with enthusiasm during Zoom meetings sometimes. I try to skip this section because I don’t know what to say. My pronouns are a lack, they remain empty space where someday something should go. In recent years, I have begun to anticipate that perhaps language is the thing that arrives last, when whatever you are doing—with confidence and instinct —becomes a thing that needs describing.
Divorce
I find it exciting when people get divorced. I know this is bad. And I don’t want anyone I care about to feel pain. But I can be so seduced by the story of starting over; the allure of a blank slate, even when it’s someone else’s. Back in the days when I had fantasies, they involved packing a single bag and leaving in the night, arriving in a new country and walking the streets without a connection to any of the humans passing me by. This was before D, even. I told my fantasy to a friend once, and she interrupted to have me start over. When I finished telling her a second time she said, “I thought you were telling me about a nightmare, but I guess you did mean fantasy.”
Fantasies
You know what I’m gonna say.
Precognition
Starting late last night, a wild hope began to sweep the people around me, and we started to text and call each other to say that perhaps the tide was going the right way, perhaps Pennsylvania would be ours, and therefore the necessary electoral votes. Around midnight, a friend with a friend inside the Biden campaign told me that they were certain of their victory. This is not precognition, however, but math—knowing which ballots are outstanding, from which counties and what the historical bent of those counties has been over the last set of elections. Perhaps if I was better at math, I would be better at predicting outcomes.
Outcomes
generally catch me off guard.
Outcomes 2
For example nearly a year earlier in February 2020, when I said, “Oh, in Wuhan? That’s terrible, I hope they’re all OK.” And then signed a contract for a job that would start several months later. They were not OK, and neither were we though we didn’t know it yet, and the job no longer exists.
What Exists
So at last count we have the bats and the flying squirrels in the attic; an army of mice in the basement who occasionally pop out into the kitchen to see what’s happening; deer lingering at the edge of the woods where grass becomes tree and sometimes—
with a voyeuristic deliberation—right outside the windows; wild turkeys the size of Labrador retrievers; and a bear who spent our first week in the Farmhouse aggressively pooping by the door of the back studio, determined to make a point about who belonged here and who did not. This house stood unoccupied for many years before we bought it. Or: unoccupied by humans, but very much occupied. As I am writing this, a small flock of ladybugs are spiraling around the light, climbing the windows. I don’t mind ladybugs. They have always seemed well-mannered to me, as opposed to flies, who have no idea how to behave and just fling themselves manically at things. Flies are the equivalent of people who won’t stop shouting. Last month it was the stinkbugs, armored like tanks, rumbling up the windows and walls. I don’t know where they all come from. They’re just here and then they’re gone, tidal and inexplicable. I am not a person who understands nature, or rhythms, or patterns, or things that occur outside of cities.
Outside of Cities
are places where you get axe-murdered, or eaten by a bear, or suddenly everything is on fire, or there’s a mudslide, or a nest of rattlesnakes, or the power goes out and when it comes back on you’ve vanished and nobody ever finds your body.
Cities
are places where you need more money than you have, at any given time.
Money
I was so broke for so long. This is not an original story. Then I wrote in three television rooms, one after the other, and we bought a farmhouse. This was a story I didn’t know was possible. I don’t
come from money, so I didn’t understand what it would be like to have it, and what it would feel like to spend that amount of it. Now it’s gone again, and due to the pandemic, everything is uncertain. But there is this farmhouse, with its entire menagerie, telling me a story I’d never imagined about how time and labor can sum into tangible shelter, about how I might actually be a person capable of providing for my family—chosen and otherwise—about roots and what it would feel like to choose a place to belong to. And all the stories I told myself about what was possible, what my life would be, have taken a back seat to the sheer uncertainty that is rewriting everything I thought I knew, in ways both terrible and beautiful.
Uncertainty
is the way you choose to wait for a thing you cannot predict.
A Brief And Pessimistic History Lesson
Precedent abounds in this land: accumulated crisis and restless, implacable transformation; violence and our many participations therein; a ruthless and cyclical reshaping of violence into history, and history into culture. Let me lens in tighter to the earth just under my feet: the Mohicans and Lenape slaughtered by the colonizing English; the English, French and Dutch then murdering each other; the Revolutionary War bringing General Washington to camp out eighty miles south in Newburgh; flash forward to the industrial revolution as the first railway—the Mohawk & Hudson— strings a steel grin between Albany and Schenectady, where in a few weeks I will sit in line for an hour and fifteen minutes, awaiting a COVID test. What am I trying to say in all this other than that history has upended us again and again, that we have upended each other: “us” meaning the bodies that came and went on this
land; “us” changing decade by decade, century by century; “us” as a grouping that would in no way have recognized itself as an “us.” What am I trying to say in all this, if not that history has upended us and the upending has become a culture, a religion, an identity of constant shared disbelief that it can get so much worse, that it can get so much better, that it can get so much worse.
Waiting 3
Dark falls by five p.m. now. In a few more weeks, it will be by four. A thick dusk, unbroken by streetlights. D has strung fairylights between the house and the heavy oaks, and on the kitchen side of the farmhouse, they cast a coppery glow. Networks haven’t called it yet, although it is becoming clearer and clearer that Pennsylvania will make Biden and Harris the next president and vice president. People are saying that networks are hesitating to make the call, fearing subsequent chaos and violence. Bearded white men with guns stand for photographs outside the Detroit Convention Center; in Philadelphia, liberal protestors have coopted a conservative protest and turned it into a dance party. In the footage, someone dressed as a blue USPS drop-box twerks, and with every twerk, the mail-flap flaps. We are poised on the edge of something fluid and large, many-shaped, many-handed. I am trying to see past my many obfuscations to what is true. This country is filled with ghosts. Tiny mouse-feet scratch overhead in the ceiling; I track the warm weight of its body as it travels the length of the beams. The mice are just doing what I’m doing, operating in the face of ceaseless uncertainty, seeking shelter.
Winter
Every year the dark comes earlier and earlier, every year it is winter again, and every year the shock of it is new.