Have you adjusted to “the new normal” yet? I haven’t. I feel like a little piece of my spirit is dying with every day that this continues. OK, maybe not every day, but there’s a gradual downward slide in my outlook and well-being that just keeps sinking.
It’s so hard to put into words just what’s so bad about all of this. After all, I’m an introvert. I like people in small doses. I love my house. I’m a stay-at-home mom who already, well, spent 95 percent of my time at home. But having my in-person interactions reduced to basically the three people I live with, and then the handful of commercial transactions with a mask covering our mouths — we are not meant to live this way. Not even the introverts.
I found myself recently thinking about the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five, where the main character time-travels throughout his life, except he can’t control it. He just keeps waking up in different points of the timeline and has to go with it. This is hard to explain, so I’ll let Kurt Vonnegut do the explaining:
“Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.
He says.
Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” (Slaughterhouse-Five)
Realistically, this kind of time travel seems like a curse of a way to live compared to linear time. But the thing is, Billy Pilgrim is also a prisoner of war during World War II, living in a German-controlled factory in Dresden while the Americans bomb the city. The POWs are starving and frightened, counting down the days, waiting for either their death or their rescue. They’re listening to the planes and the bombs as the Allies — their side — dropped nearly 4,000 tons of explosives over the city of their captors. So rather than living through those dark days, days that I can imagine are full of horror and anxiety (and even boredom in the weeks between the bombing days), Billy’s time-traveling condition moves him from one point of life to another like a ping pong ball, and he’s not trapped in the continuation of despair.
And what I wouldn’t give to be able to wake up one morning and find myself as 19-year-old Carrie back in college, lining up with her friends to see an early release of Being John Malkovich at the Hoff on campus. Or 2014 Carrie, with baby Rye to moon over and take for walks to the city playground. Or even 2024 Carrie, so I could see what life will be like once the virus is no longer novel and we’ve got a handle on it. Oh, to be able to not only talk face to face without cloth barriers, but to hug and laugh and not worry about invisible diseases.
So far the only time travel I have been able to achieve are tiny flashbacks. Remembering my 30th birthday party because we are using up the last of those cocktail party napkins, after not being able to buy regular napkins at stores. Discovering and rewatching the first three seasons of America’s Next Top Model, my favorite show when I was in my early 20s. Repainting all the walls on the first floor, and remembering back to 2009 when I painted them the first time with a pair of friends. But as for moving forward, I’m still clueless about what the future will hold.
So it goes.
