I’m sitting outside

With a mask on my face

And I shouldn’t be here

Writing. It’s unsafe.

But I am here. I am here.

Why? Because the only time

I feel like myself these days

Is when I am outside.

It’s nighttime and imminently cool and autumn hangs in the air reminding me that time has indeed passed. I wonder what it will mean to have gone a whole summer like this. Particularly when summer, as Sam Keen wrote, is “a time when laziness finds respectability.”

Under normal circumstances I struggle with being respectably lazy. During the pandemic I’ve had even less of a sense of what it means to be respectably lazy.

There’s a sense we must always be “on.” Be online, be working, be schooling, be watching, be informed. Perhaps this is a convenient surrogate for the desire to be somewhere else.

III.

The pandemic affects everyone differently because fundamentally every human experience is different. The pandemic has emphasized that, sweeping away the artifice of equality that we in America in particular like to pretend encompasses our nation. I had hoped that in being forced to consider the unique and private lives of so many people we would perform Kintsugi.

IV.

In the Japanese art of Kintsugi shattered pottery is repaired using lacquer laced with gold or silver so as to draw attention to the fractures. Kintsugi isn’t so much the art of putting back together but putting back together differently—so that the physical evidence of trauma is made beautiful and appreciated. The metaphor is easily applied to people, society, the world. But we often overlook the most inconvenient question: Where will we get the gold for our lacquer?

Historically in times of personal crisis I’ve turned to books for solace. That hasn’t quite worked this time, not smoothly anyway. For instance, I re-read some Faulkner recently and came upon the familiar quote:

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

Reading it this time I could not ignore the source of those words, Addie Bundren, the titular character of As I Lay Dying. I could not ignore that she recalls those words with resignation in the only chapter she narrates of a novel that is about her death.

Besides, what does “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” mean in a pandemic when living itself is a risk factor for dying?

VI.

My exploration of books unearthed a peculiar finding, something I’ve been vaguely aware of since my college days: Writers love alluding to things their fathers once said. “My father once said” sits in the pantheon of well-worn phrases like “once upon a time” and “it was just a regular Sunday afternoon.”

Despite all of this, I’m going to tell you about something my father once said to me.

It wasn’t at a graduation, wedding, or funeral or even in person. It was over FaceTime a few months ago.

He said to me, “True patience isn’t the absence of longing. Anything worth your patience you will still want badly.”

And given that I had for too long during this pandemic anticipated some sort of serene monkish detachment to resolve within me when at last I had mastered patience, this advice was the best I had gotten in a very long time.

VII.

There’s a phrase my friends use called “COVID Summer.” I find it peculiar and compelling. Peculiar because it contains its own contradiction: COVID and summer are in many ways anathema to each other. To say “COVID Summer” is to acknowledge that this summer is not like most summers. It is “COVID Summer.” And yet, to say “COVID Summer” is to assert that this summer is still summer, that it is irreducible and cannot be taken away. Whether it’s socially distanced barbecues or long evening walks on the phone with someone you love, we find summer in our strange and constrained everyday lives. I find that compelling.

VIII.

I’m in the little nook on the side street with the candy shop and shiny black metal armchairs and good streetlight to write by. I have my mask on my face and I’m outside writing because, as you know, it helps.

I am thinking about where we will be in the fall. What winter will bring. What it will feel like when spring comes again and if next summer we’ll still say COVID Summer. Most of all, I am thinking about how at some point this will all be over. Not discreetly or all at once. But how at some point you will wake up and think of the COVID-19 pandemic as something that happened. I wonder where you’ll be then and how it will feel for you.