We’ve been living with pandemic restrictions for a full six months now. In California, I’m guessing, we’ll be in lockdown for the rest of this year and into the next one. I feel like a fish adapting to breathe in brackish water – not swimming in the clear, clean water of normal life, but not tossed about in the cloudy, roiling surf of pandemic panic either.

Facemasks feel normal now, choosing what to watch and read every night has become a quiet pleasure, makeup no longer matters . . .

I’m nineteen years old. I’m wearing a floral dress, singing How Beautiful Are the Feet from Handel’s Messiah for my Mormon church congregation in Los Angeles on Easter Sunday. This aria is high, it’s slow, it requires precision and purity. There’s no place to hide. I am terrified through every breath, but once the piano starts and everyone is looking at me there’s nothing to do but keep going until I finish. So I sing. And then I walk off of the dais, sit down in a pew at the side of the chapel and burst into surprised, uncontrollable tears. 

As I write this morning, I’m listening to mournful Max Richter music and thinking about what it means to be alive now. The tectonic plate shifts in the first months of 2020 broke apart “normal life” all around the world. Here in America the virus forced us to confront the economic inequality and health disparities that lay beneath the way our country works. George Floyd’s murder was the tragic catalyst that opened millions upon millions of eyes to the racism that was embedded in America’s DNA before there was an America.

It was 1984. I was 21, home from college on spring break, wasting time with my two brothers on the dilapidated brown sofa in the family room, watching MTV in the middle of a bright afternoon. The videos were just background noise until I heard the laid back perfection of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Cold Shot”. Those opening guitar licks took hold of me in an instant.

The overwrought 80’s video production barely registered. It was the sound. Something buried, nameless and dark in me latched onto those notes and would not let go. I didn’t know that my heart had been waiting for a translator that could speak its wordless language, waiting for a way to show me the silted sorrows that dwelt layers down in my soul.

The world before March seems like another lifetime on another planet – thumbing through the May issues of Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar made me feel like I was looking at the archaeological records of a dead society. Huge travel features. Really? Jewelry and extravagant handbags. Really??

None of us knows what life will be like on the other side. Nor do we know how and when we might start carefully venturing back into the world. “Normal it will not be,” Governor Gavin Newsom told Californians on April 14. Just how not normal remains to be seen.