Client U20.ND18 - Session 2

(Beep. Music fades in.)

My girlfriend has turned grocery shopping into this weekly, solitary but sacred ritual. She won’t let me go out to the store anymore. Now sure, if she catches the virus and brings it home, what difference does it make who had it first, but it’s not about that. It has surprisingly little to do with the thing we’ve all been working to fight. Rather, it’s about the battle that’s being fought in my own head. Whether or not it’s wise or rational to think this way, I’m not worried of getting sick. I’m afraid of spreading it. I’m afraid of getting other people sick. It’s a reimagination of that age old fear of mine that I’ll hurt people in some way or another. This entire situation has just played into that fear perfectly. 

My girlfriend has stepped up against it, though. Now she goes out into those enclosed spaces with her mask firmly on. She goes out early when it’s still kind of quite not just with a grocery list but an outright game plan. She gets what we need from the mom and pop store on the corner that people have been largely ignoring. 

Then she comes home, usually while I’m still asleep and dumps the bags in the sink. She kicks off her shoes without touching them and throws them under the sink, using a paper towel to keep from touching the cabinet door. And then she retreats into the shower with her clothes on. Disrobing there once they’re dripping wet. We don’t have a washer, so this works as well as anything. And she uses the same bar soap to wash herself and the clothes. 

When that’s done, she goes back out into the kitchen and wipes down the bags and the food that came prepackaged. If something can be transferred into another container, she usually just does that. All the food storage containers were set out open on the counter before she left, so she can just transfer everything. Wipe it all down. And wash her hands repeatedly. Luckily I messed up a handsoap order just before this started, so we ended up with a couple extra containers. And she was able to pick one up at the store recently. She told me that at our store, people have to pack their own groceries now. I’m not sure if that’s a common thing or if that’s just our place. But when she packs her bags, she keeps the produce separate from everything else. So it’s one less thing for her to worry about.

Usually when she jumps into the shower, that’s when I wake up. But we already had a conversation about me going into the kitchen to help her. Namely, that she is very passionate about me not doing so. She doesn’t me in there, around the potential contaminants. She can’t say it, but she’s scared I’m going to get sick. Because of the asthma not because of the spreading. 

I listen just because I would never want to hurt or upset her. I listen because I know this is how she keeps some sense of control. Keeping me from touching things that I really don’t need to touch, that gives her a sense of power when we’re all powerless. And honestly, this ritual makes me love her more. Like it summons my affection for her. Which is stupid. Probably.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

While that story might have been sweet, I am telling it to you because I want you to understand that I know guilt. I know what it is to feel like you aren’t reacting properly. Like your reaction undercuts the real tragedies of the world. I’m falling in love with my girlfriend all over again while the rest of our city is burning. 

We watch the daily press briefings happening in our state, where they report all the numbers and strategies for containment. And we probably should stop that. Like we could find the abridged version online and that one doesn’t have the same punch. In the abridged, at least to us, the death toll doesn’t feel so devastating.

And for me, I know that not everyone could lock themselves at home. Not everyone has a partner willing to go to the lengths mine does to keep me safe. I’m not even suffering as much as my girlfriend is. Right beside me as I watch those briefings is someone who spends an entire morning every week being overwhelmed by her fear. 

And what am I doing? What am I doing during her misery? I’m sitting in bed falling in love with her again. Because it’s nice that someone cares about you.

But enough about me. What are you doing? You are getting through your school work to graduate in June. You don’t get to have the social side of your senior year, but that’s not something you get to be upset about right? You should be more worried about the job front. But oh wait, nepotism. And certain sectors of the tech market, like the one you were going to jump in, haven’t had the same panic and deflation that other places have and will. Your job offer didn’t change. You’ll be fine.

Even when I say it, it sounds like bragging, doesn’t it? You made decisions that came easy to you. You just happened to fall out of your mother with skills and inclinations that were compatible with a structure that is so quick to lock other people out. 

(Music restarts)

I see it. You see it. But being seen by a couple people actually doesn’t do much. You want it to. You want it to because you are rightfully angry. This same system hurt your friends. And if it were a person who hurt your friends…. Well, okay I don’t want this to ever be evidence against you in a court of law. Which would be hard. But I’m an anxious person. So there’s that. I’ll leave that thought there.

But my point is that you have this urge and desire to protect and defend. But there’s just no outlet for it right now.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

And you want to make one. But you can’t. You try. And when you can’t directly try, you beg and plead with the people in your life that seem to stand as some sort of representative of these things, these things that are harming your friend, but they don’t listen. 

You know the sort of person who would mock my girlfriend and all her precautions, right? Despite the fact that, well, she’ll admit there’s a chance she’s taking it too far, but it makes her feel safer. Like how making a quarantine box for our mail has literally no effect on anyone, except it makes online shopping feel like something safe we can do.

You are trying, which is more than what others are doing. But there’s no achievement or marker for progress on that front. There’s no grade or score, and that’s how you were taught to monitor progress. How many points do you have out of the maximum number. 

That’s the metric that was always used with you, but there’s different ways to measure progress. That’s just the one we instill in kids’ brains, to make some other things easier. And I won’t deny that there’s probably a necessity there. But consequences can never be negated, not even by necessity, not by any argument made for something. In reality, consequences need to be mitigated. That’s the only answer. 

And in this case, that mitigation would be recognizing this and relearning. Reevaluate your relationship with your notions of personal progress. 

Accept and embrace slow progress. Baby steps. Moving forward. That’s not nothing, but it’s not easily proven. It never fit on a report card.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

However, a nothing, feeling nothing, is something you can prove. It’s not a perfect fit for the model you grew up with. It’s more of a pass-fail sort of metric. That you’re still familiar with. And you can control yourself, right? Just like you can memorize the contents of a study guide. Your guilt is a way of taking control, to achieve some sort of end you can see. You want to force yourself to feel like you think you should about the loss of the rest of your senior year because… Well, it fits within the schema that you internalized. A structure that never saw you for all that you are. Something more than statistics and figures, something more than a performer in a maze, something much more than a number.

Right now, in this moment, you are still a student, yes, but you are more than a student. You were always going to be more than a student. If you could see yourself like that, well, there’ll be a lot of grief right at the beginning, but we can get through that. In reality, this situation is going to force you to realize something about yourself. But it’s something we all had to go through: all of us kids who were touted as gifted. They didn’t teach us how to land, after this. I’ll say that much.

(Beep. Music fades out)

The Oracle of Dusk is a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. It was written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey. And if you like the show, tell friends about it or the quasi-friends that are still on your social media feeds because social norms evolved before words did, am I right?