On Living in a Never-Ending Present
I watched the coronavirus news spread from Asia to Europe in the early weeks of 2020. Then to the United States. Then in mid-March, it reached Guatemala, where I was living at the time, and began to impact my daily life. Even as the country shut its borders, instituted daily curfews, and emptied of tourists, I didn’t recognize how long-lasting COVID-19’s effects would be. I wrote, that first day in my journal, that I hoped this time would be “a good thing for all of us, good for our art and our work and our reading and our relationships to ourselves and to our loved ones.”
That feels impossibly naïve now.
As COVID-19 started taking tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of lives—as it destroyed economies, cultures, and communities—it was also taking something else: the future.
Living with the constant specter of a highly contagious and often fatal disease with no cure and no vaccine has meant that we are living in a constant state of suspended animation. We cannot freely plan for the future because we don’t know when the present will end.
It stretches on and on and on, and even as its contours change slightly—allowing for partial openings and half-steps forward—we remain unable to imagine what live will look like in a month or a year.
The loss of the future feels doubly painful because I have lost both my future and the person I thought I’d build it with.
The pandemic has changed the rules of the world and taken away the ability to plan into the future for all of us. Things to look forward to—concerts, weddings, sitting in a movie theater with a vat of popcorn passed between friends, trips to other countries or just to the lake, graduation parties, ordering an entrée each and an extra for the table, conferences, being hunched next to a stranger on a ski lift—have evaporated, leaving us to anticipate only what we can fit into the confines of a socially-distanced day. A trip to the grocery store. A walk around the block. A virtual celebration. And it’s not that those things can’t bring meaning of their own; they can and do and should. But they’re not built to withstand the entirety of our expectations for joy and fulfillment. At least not mine.
You could argue that I’m thinking about that poorly. That building a life sustained by everyday joys is the right way to do it, and that wanting more (in wanting vacations or big trips or dinners out) is looking for happiness in the wrong places.
Even a life without those wants, though, still gets joy from anticipation. From the hug you’ll get from your friend when you meet up. From the feeling of coming home to your family after a long day out. From the warmth of community when you gather together at church or a baseball game or a book reading.
It is that joy of anticipation we have all lost. We can’t plan farther into the future than several days because who knows what we or the world will be like then. We can’t look forward to seeing all our friends at once, unmediated by a screen and with voices we register in real time. We can’t plan for celebrations or excursions or adventures in any of the normal ways, and the new ones—the Zoom trivia nights and graduation ceremonies and singalong concerts and museum tours—don’t cut it.
I feel those losses deeply. Maybe if I was sheltering in place in a home I’d curated to be a sanctuary, feeling solidarity with a physical community I’d invested time in, and regularly connecting and collaborating with colleagues, the losses would be easier to bear. But I’ve spent the last two and a half years whittling down the pillars of my life until only complete geographical freedom and professional / financial independence remained.
Said otherwise: all I had (aside from my relationship, which we’ll get to in a second) was the sense of anticipation, of wondering where I’d explore next and what I’d learn there and what I’d write about it. Without that anticipation, and that pillar of travel, who am I?
When I lived in New York, the pillars of my life were clear. I had my job, which structured the majority of my waking hours. I had my physical location, the city I’d chosen to live in and the apartment that housed me within it, a place I returned to at the end of most days. And I had my identity, my interests: reading, eating, exploring, writing, advocating. There were other satellite pillars, like family and education, accessed often but not daily. When I left my job and the city, the only through line of that life that I brought with me was my identity.
I’d toppled the other pillars to make room for as much freedom as possible to explore myself. Who was I without working in finance? Who was I without living in New York? What kind of activities would I gravitate towards, what kind of people would I connect with, what new skills would I cultivate? And at the end, what version of myself would remain?
The first six months were hard but incredibly fruitful. I constantly asked myself what kinds of pillars I could imagine building in the future and started to stress-test some answers. Dedicated hiker, no. Long-term traveler, probably also a no. Someone content working 60 hours a week and commuting several hours each day and not feeling deeply connected to what I was building, definitely a no. A mother one day, yes. A novelist one day, perhaps.
But then I met Diego, and he became a pillar.
I’d never had a single human be one before, and it was scary at first, trusting and depending so much on one person. I remember a conversation he and I had in a park—in our park, Parque de las Ciencias, sitting on a stone bench and watching children climb all over the multi-colored installations—during my first or second week of living with him in Buenos Aires. I told him I was anxious about the bet we were taking, about having decided to live together mere weeks into our relationship, about me being a new country and new culture and about the pressure that meant I was putting on him and on our relationship.
He responded perfectly. He took my hands and told me that we didn’t have to have all the answers right then. That we were going to figure it out together. That we would take it one day at a time.
So we did.
And after we’d stacked up several weeks and months of days, I realized that the bet had worked out. I had two new pillars—this person I loved, who brought me to bookstores he thought I’d like and cooked me elaborate meals and made me feel so cherished and celebrated and cared for that I’d regularly go to bed giddy with my good fortune at finding him, and this city I loved, with its jacaranda-lined avenues and its legion of said bookstores. I made friends, I mapped out the best carrot cake in the city, and I enjoyed being in love with a person and a place.
And then we left. I still had the travel bug, and Diego was game to try it out, so we took off for the U.S. with a plan to cross the country and make our way into Mexico and Central America. And we did, and it was magical: watching sunset over the Grand Canyon, eating ribs slathered in barbeque sauce in a converted gas station in St. Louis, running up and down the stairs of the Red Rock Amphitheater, playing darts with my dad at a bar in Battle Creek, wading into the ocean from a dozen different California beaches. There were less-than-magical times, though, too, of course, and I was in a bad position to weather them. I hadn’t realized until after we left Buenos Aires how much I’d come to appreciate having a physical community of friends and counselors, and though I kept in touch with those people like I did with my former New York community while we traveled, it wasn’t the same. Just like a Zoom wedding is not the same thing as a ceremony performed in front of packed church pews covered in flowers, a WhatsApp call is not the same as sitting in Rapanui debating career paths and getting relationship advice over chocolate-covered raspberries.
Without the pillars of place, job, or extended community, the pressure on my relationship grew and grew. Mexico and Cuba and Belize and Guatemala saw Diego and I having similar ups and downs of incredible experiences and connection combined with struggles to communicate and to grow together.
And in Antigua, after months of trying to find a way through, we broke up.
Slowly and then all at once, the pillars I’d imagined holding up our future life together, lined up in a row—spending a summer in Italy eating pizza with his cousins, playing volleyball Up North with mine, going to my friends’ weddings together, exploring Ecuador with his family, planning another Christmas adventure with mine, buying property in BA, having weddings on two continents, having kids—fell down. I was left standing in their rubble, living in what felt like an especially painful never-ending present and looking at the ruins of a future.
It has been hard to let go of the future I was looking forward to. To the specific trips and events and places. But it has been ten times harder still to let go of the idea of being able to build a new future, any future, with Diego. Some part of me hopes I’m just letting go of it for now. That we’ll find our way back there. But who knows?
I flew back to the U.S. today, alone. I put 2,700 miles between myself and the person who is mi hogar. Who was mi hogar. What tense do we use for emotions we felt in the past and feel in the present but have decided don’t, for now, belong in the future?
Now that that hogar is gone, I feel lost. I am sitting here at an empty business center, surrounded by brown pleather banquettes and angular off-white tables and blue wingback chairs, in the Houston airport. My breath, diverted by my mask, is fogging up my glasses, as if the tears didn’t make it hard enough to see.
I keep thinking of the Día de los Muertos parade Diego and I went to in Mexico City. We walked the 20 minutes from our apartment to La Reforma, the main avenue leading to the heart of the city, which was teeming with revelry: kids in costumes and elaborate face paint, vendors hawking everything from tiny knit Catrina dolls to roasted nuts to plastic cups of melon sorbet sprinkled with salty-spicy-sweet chamoy. There were cotton candy carts set up every couple of meters, and the men manning the carts kept the machines spinning constantly, even when their hands were engaged slipping a cloud of cotton candy into a plastic bag or taking money from a customer. As a result, little wisps of spun sugar would fly out of the machines and float above the parade, getting caught in the tree branches or snatched out of the air by enterprising passerby, Diego and me included. We’d snatch at the air, jumping up with open hands, hoping to catch a bit of sweetness.
That’s what trying to imagine my new future feels like—reaching for one tiny strand of fast-dissolving sugar at a time.
I know where I will literally go from here. The logistics, comforting in their finite knowability, unfurl before me: a connecting flight to Chicago, an airport hotel, a rental car, an apartment in Ann Arbor to quarantine in.
Beyond that?
I can’t imagine, yet alone locate, the version of myself who set out to explore such a pillar-less existence in the first place.
But I know I will learn to find it again.
I have to.
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