TUNES // heka – (a) wall
Post by Misha
Jesus. Has it been a month already again? It’s just rained or else is just about to rain, and cloud cover makes the park into just another empty room. I have an appointment to get the vaccine tomorrow. Next month, I’ll go home to see family. I bought the tickets last week. My parents will meet my partner for the first time. I’ll visit his childhood home. After that, I expect, there will be other things. I’ll sit in a restaurant with friends, and we’ll order a few different appetizers and share them amongst ourselves. I’ll meet up with someone I haven’t seen in a long time at a crowded bar and we’ll scream small talk directly into each other’s ear drums.
It’s the strangest thing. It’s not that I don’t want to move forward, get out of this awful mess, it’s just that I assumed that moving forward would mean going back – not to normal, exactly, but to something resembling a known quantity – and that that would be the easy part. The other day I went to a live stream recording for my partner’s band, which is the closest thing to a show I’ve been to in – well, you know how long it’s been. There were a few people there – the band, a couple of people managing the livestream, and a videographer. It was a familiar, eerie scene. The ceiling was low. There was a faint sharp smell from a pickle factory nearby. Everyone was talking about vaccines. The conversation chugged unevenly, like a machine that’s been left for too long, bogged down with the rust and sludge of disuse. Of all the things that have been lost this last year, social skills are hardly the most notable among them, but still I was surprised at just how much I felt like a child, floundering and embarrassed. How unlike the person I remember being just a few months ago.
It was a relief to get back home, to shut the door, to stare at the ceiling. Inside the walls of my apartment, there is less floundering and embarrassment. Inside, when things get bad, there is only quiet, private despair, which is not great but does have the advantage of being witnessless.
“Normal” has become a collective mantra, a promise you overhear on the streets in snippets of conversation that need no further context because everyone is always only ever talking about the same three or four things. We kept stubbornly promising it, this nebulous normalcy, as the months piled up, and the intricacies of Zoom muting etiquette became second nature, and “keys, wallet, phone” became “keys, wallet, phone, mask”, long after the strangeness of our situation faded, after our routines adjusted, after the ads in the subway and on our phones switched from pushing concert tickets or vacation packages, to grocery delivery and disinfectants.
I say it now – “when things go back to normal” – with an edge of desperation, because, despite every insistence, despite all efforts to delineate clearly between what’s normal and whatever it is that’s happening now, the reality remains. At some point I let it in, the disaster. I let it become the day to day. And now I’m finding that there’s not quite enough of the old normal left to fall back on. Whatever the next months bring, I will have to build it, coax it out of hiding, oil its creaking joints. This is exciting, of course. All that opportunity, the newness, the creation. I was just thinking of something else, I guess. Maybe I was imagining sinking into a pandemic-less future like a familiar armchair. It sounds so silly to say. The future is never an armchair.
Anyway, I’m grateful for the world opening itself like a blossom, the green things in the sidewalk cracks, the man in the park who plays the accordion. I’m grateful and I’m tired and I’m inside still, listening to lots of quiet, inside music, suddenly aware of how very large and loud everything outside used to be, and will be again very soon.
Buy (a) wall here.