elizabethlevett

The world is bad. You’ve got to deal with it. You’ve got to make terms. – The Lady From Shanghai

Let’s say you live in a one-bedroom apartment, which you like, with another person, whom you like, even love, most of the time. Now let’s say there’s a pandemic and so you and this other person, whom you like, love, most of the time, don’t go out much and don’t have people over much because of this, um, pandemic thing. Your options are limited. It’s you and him bumping into each other day after day, night after night, for months. To make things more vivid let’s say it’s a particularly harrowing election year, fires and drought have ravaged your state for months and the news has been full of disheartening violence and hate. There was something awhile back about murderous hornets. Murder hornets, for heaven’s sake! Street people have been camped in front of boarded up store fronts. Familiar shops and cafes have been shuttered or closed altogether. And, and! There was even an asteroid – an asteroid hurtling through space in the general direction of the planet you call home.

Okay, now picture this. You’re a school teacher. You teach little bitty, sweet, smart, kind, resilient – and sometimes very needy five and six-year-old children on your laptop in your living room while your stalwart partner sneaks through the front door of your – remember – one bedroom apartment bearing piles of laundry and loads of groceries from Trader Joe’s. (“Did you get flowers? I’m on mute.”)

You’ve pretty much figured it all out. You have a schedule. You have an understanding. It’s all good. For now. But who knows what’s coming next?? You tell yourself you’ll be ready. You have wipes and gloves and masks and sanitizer and toilet paper and coffee and wine and chocolate. You go for walks. You get a flu shot for the first time in years because they say it will help. You upload your lesson plans ahead of time and hope they’ll actually have time to read them. You make sure your students have all the stuff they’ll need each week. You collect all the books you’ll read aloud and look for fun math games to play. You spend hours on that elusive holy grail – student engagement. You read a hundred emails a day. You keep up with district directives and union agreements. You go to virtual meetings. You pay attention. You take notes. You follow through. You stay positive.

By Saturday night you’ve kind of had it. You’ve spun out – like Priss in Blade Runner. Now, under normal circumstances, on Saturday night, the two of you, you and that lovely guy with his arms so often full of groceries or ironing would sit together with a drink after supper and maybe take in a movie or listen to music together. But you reach a point when you need more than anything some time by yourself. Time to putter aimlessly or sit in the backyard and look at the stars instead of a screen. You need time to talk to nobody at all. And so you reach an agreement – an accord. You make terms. You relinquish your hold on the living room, the remote, the laptop, the whole business. You allow said partner to indulge in an evening of sci-fi and horror movie abandon. You allow him to binge with your blessings on Godzilla, or early Star Trek, or Creature Features to his heart’s content and you waltz happily away. This gives you the freedom to – no, not lift weights, not do your yoga, not tick any of the boxes that say “Self Care” in that slithery half-whisper that somehow always comes with judgement. No, you choose instead the fair road of pleasure and forgetting. You, dear reader have all the time in the world, you say to yourself. Open some wine, take out a little dark chocolate, sort out that sock drawer or find your watercolors. Give yourself a facial. Do your nails. Or find your notebook and your favorite pen and just write. Write whatever your pen and its comforting loops and scratches beckons from you. Watch the moon rise. Things are what they are. Take this time for yourself. Make terms.

(Photo: Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shanghai)