Beginning in a Time of Corona
Photo credit to @cottonbro
The weekend before shelter-in-place, I went on four different dates with four different men. If sexual interactions could be saved up like water in a camel's hump, I wanted to make sure I was full up. I dated like I was going to be shot into space the next day. I kissed like I was getting shipped to war, and I had the feeling that, as I said goodbye to each man, I was obliged to light a candle in the window.
Living in San Francisco is like being a third grader at a school designed by drag queens. The city is obsessed with its own culture of work hard play harder. There are putt-putt golf courses featuring holeside bottle service, bowling alleys hidden underneath concert venues, and underground raves that take place in hastily rearranged WeWork spaces. At 29, the city made me feel ancient and out of touch. I was already falling behind in every aspect of my life, and my weekends had begun to revolve around avoiding missing out on the “Next Big Thing.” This desperation extended to the men in my life, who, while on dates with me, would always look over my right ear as if a slightly better, more successful or better-networked woman would appear out of nowhere that would be more worthwhile of their time. Dating was less about personal connection and romance as it was an algorithm that needed to be optimized. And I had fully bought into the system with a devil-may-care, volume-focused approach to tindering that would've put Mae West to shame.
There was a desperation and strange nostalgia that tinged my last four dates. Meeting up at bars felt tender and fragile. My boys and I would spend long silent minutes observing the chaos and camaraderie of people crowding in for their drink orders like we were watching black and white films of our grandparents dancing. Things used to be so good, we thought to ourselves, while still living it. We clutched at each other and squeezed hands like we'd just struck the iceberg, and later on in the night when we were in bed, we would face each other and cuddle, pretending we could feel the icy black water lap around our ankles.
The following Monday I opened the windows at midnight to listen to the city shut down. The streets had already been empty for hours, and for the first time since moving to the city, I could hear the birds. I went to bed alone, thinking that it would be a good time to masturbate, but not having the emotional energy to give myself that small reprieve.
The next weeks were strange ones. I started having incredibly vivid sex dreams about people I went to highschool with, but was too dorky to talk to. I started sexting with a guy I had hooked up with three years previously. I brutishly and forcefully sent unsolicited nudes to the guys I had been seeing, with varying levels of joy at one end of the scale to one guy on the other end telling me, 'I know you meant to cheer me up, but this is just more depressing.' I started to fantasize about elaborate rituals for washing hands in which men I couldn't see would come over and shower immediately, changing into sterilized robes that I had someho prepared. We would rub soap over our hands for hours on end and squirt purell into each others palms, gazing iris to iris while we rubbed it in and waited for it to dry. We would then carefully, delicately intertwine our fingers.
I started going for walks late at night so I could avoid as many people as possible, but walking past all the shuttered and boarded up restaurants and bars made me cry. I pictured the neighbors starting to refer to me as the weird sobbing girl. The highlight of the second week was starting to communicate with my neighbors across the street with post-it note missives and incredibly detailed drawings. I started to chat with the woman on the third floor, and found out her cat was named Oliver. One night at the end of one of my walks I stood under her window to feel a little closer to her and looked at my own dark apartment. I saw that my neighbors above and below me had all also been communicating with Oliver's owner, and I felt a deep sense of betrayal that could only be equaled by my childhood trauma of watching the Sonics move to Oklahoma City. A different neighbor across the street with a penchant for wandering around his apartment shirtless also caught my attention. He asked for my number via paper towel and permanent marker taped to his window, and we've been flirting ever since. I rearranged my desk for a better view, my apartment being higher than his I suddenly feel protective over him. I start doing my hair and posting more on instagram. I started walking around my apartment naked.
It's week three and I find myself unspooling gently. I feel constantly high, although it's been four days since my last edible. I've started to get to know my neighbors so intimately that now I feel like I can trust them with their own privacy again. They will be safe without my care, without my vigilent watching. I'm texting the boys less, and masturbating more. I've taken up painting more, and reading the books I always said I would read later. I started to write without irony about setting boundaries with men. And I started to gather little dust bunnies of courage from under all the responsibilities I had been ignoring and started planning this magazine.
This magazine was something I had wanted to do for a long time, and I had even had the name treasured since childhood, when my dad would let me read chain letters outloud to him while I spun around in his office chair. "You can lead a whorticulture," one read, "but you can't make her think." In another email, my dad chuckles as I say aloud, "a good cowgirl always keeps her calves together." It took me a long time to understand these jokes, to read these as ideals or cautionary tales, and I carefully grafted them onto my personality as a form of performative chasteness. It took me longer to shed that mantle in exchange for a short skirt and a pair of Docs. I think about feminist labor, and consider the pros and cons of charging my boyfriend for every time he has to ask when our anniversary is. I think about how much I spend on shampoo and then look up projected earnings for girls on onlyfans.com. I think about how I used to write but I've been too scared, and too traumatized, to write for years now. I think maybe this is the time to take the plunge. When the world is falling apart, the space is created for radical change. In this space, perhaps it is the time in which we can tend to and cultivate the cultural institutions we live under, and perhaps grow something a little more beautiful.
