A Year Later
I just read my journal from March 10, 2020. I wasn’t thinking about the plague or the end of the world, but when I could finally hit “publish” on my book and be done with an era that began in 2007 . By March of 2020, I had maxed out the money, time, energy, sweat, tears and blood (I have had my toes crushed on a dance floor) and filled with end-of-project loathing for the creative brainchild at hand. Just get it out there. On March 11th, I hit send and felt a huge relief, a weigh lift off me. I would close the chapter of my life as a salsa dancer and let the fates show me what’s next…
Well, as they say, the rest is history. I did close that chapter of my life. Everyone closed that chapter. I did not dance again with a partner for almost a year. I would not stand on stage and tell jokes, go to a movie and then talk about it over tacos at Poquito Mas. As I soon discovered, I was one of the lucky ones. I had a job and live by the beach, which while technically “closed” was not policed in my neighborhood.
But as my friends said in serious tones, “you are alone.” Before the pandemic, I came home to sleep or rest, I rarely went a few days without contact with friends. I never thought about it this way at the time, but living in Los Angeles enabled me to remain single. I simply did not have the need you might if you live in, say, the Antarctic, or in the beginning of the first pandemic in a hundred years.
But here I was. All social venues and activities were gone and closed. I had a job but whole weekends stretched out before me, filled with the adventure of long Target lines.
How did I fare? I kind of deluded myself like most people. I did yoga and road my bike down the crowded bike path that was not yet closed. But looking back now I was traumatized. In the first week of April I opened the car door on my head and split the skin. The doctor wanted me to come in to get stitches. Go to the hospital? Heck no. I decided to let it heal. I had a headache for three days. How did I fare, I gave myself a concussion.
I bought too much food. Certain family members never called. I wondered if this is how it would all go down. Alone by the beach in the apocalypse. Would everyone die and it would be me foraging for food at the Marina Del Rey Trader Joe’s.
And then summer came and I told work I needed time off. I went to stay with my family in the Berkeley in July. I slept ten hours a night. I spent afternoons staring out into the Bay. I was exhausted from months of work, but also the accumulated stress. Then came the fires, the election, the ever higher death toll. And here we go…
In February of 2020, I produced a salsa comedy show. What is a salsa comedy? I don’t know, but it happened. I look at Instagram and am aghast at the magnificence of my life. One that I could not appreciate, the way none of us could appreciate anything because we are Americans and we want more and more, and different and better. The Pandemic pounded us with lots of brutal lessons, the least of which was for me that my life prior to the pandemic was, well, just fine.
I think we are still traumatized. As of today, California is re-opening, the vaccine roll-out more ubiquitous every day. But nothing will ever be the same. We are a crumbling cliff by the ocean, and could at any moment fall in.
