on the horizon

In early March, I attended what of course I didn’t realize at the time would be my last concert for who knows how long. I went and saw DRAMA, a band, if you can call a singer/deejay duo a band? I don’t know, I am sober and uncool and out of the loop but one of my favorite people invited me and after we lost Bowie and Prince in the same year I promised myself I’d say YES to every invitation to every show ever.

The show was on March 4th, nine days before my 36th birthday and thirteen days before the first shelter-in-place order was announced in San Francisco, the earliest order of its kind in the nation. March 4th was a Wednesday. Earlier that day, after teaching my first of two mid-week corporate yoga classes, I was preparing to return to teach the second when the company emailed me to let me know that all non-essential company activities had been suspended for the foreseeable future. To say my stomach dropped out would be an understatement: This two class per week gig pays my rent, and I carried this anguish and fear with me to meet my friend at Kava Bar on Divisadero before the show, uncertain and more than a slightly annoyed. It seemed like such an overreaction.

Ten weeks later, it’s a new world.

The show was announced forty-seven years ago, in November 2019. My friend bought us tickets and that show sat on my calendar for four whole months. Not much is being added to my calendar these days. It’s mostly the opposite, a resigned deconstruction of a dead-in-the-water future: A long weekend in Big Sur to celebrate my 36th birthday: Delete. A road trip home to see family for Easter: Delete. Two weeks in Rome with my mother, cat-sitting for a friend at her flat in Trastavere: Delete, delete, delete.

I am numb as I delete these horizons. Of course I’m disappointed, but it’s hard to stay there too long when, you know, the United States has become the new world epicenter for this virus.

Now, the only horizons that exist are the literal ones: I climb up the nearby hills (there are plenty), scan the skylines that surround me. I take the dog to the beach at sunset. I stand on my back porch and gaze over the rooftops of my neighbor’s houses. My calendar is increasingly full of blank space. The outer world is shut down, on pause, and there is a muted quality to life, yes, like reliving Groundhog Day over and over, except for the humor part, because while this is all absolutely absurd, walking alongside me as I move through days that look like all the other days is a grief so piercing I can’t quite look at it. Not really. Not yet.

As it hits me that there isn’t going to be any kind of a horizon, nothing to add to my calendar for quite some time, for longer than I’m comfortable considering, I feel frantic. I don’t know where to place myself. What do I do with all this energy I am so used to expending at the gym, or spending with friends, or <ugh!> going on dates? I don’t numb out the way I used to, and the too-muchness of myself, the familiar dervish within me I thought had gone dormant in recovery is stirring back to life.

It seems my demons need more love that I ever would have thought.

I’m thinking about how to wrap up this letter to you. I want to say something about how imagination doesn’t require leaving the house. That perhaps it is a gateway to creating a different sort of horizon, one that lives inside, one that will carry the torch for our broken hearts as we muddle our way forward. I write about imagination, and I worry about sounding pithy, or cliche, or that I’m minimizing reality. But it’s also true that everything in reality once started as the seed of someone’s imagination. And I want to do my best to nurture this seed inside me, even as I forgive myself when it’s really fucking hard and all I actually do is scroll through Instagram or stuff my face or get so caught up in the news cycle that I have to lay in bed for a while after and just stare at the wall.

In my imagined horizon, there are Big Things, like finishing writing my book and election results that don’t make me want to throw in all the towels and fundamental systemic change and yeah, going to Rome with my mom, but mostly my imagination returns me to that crowded music venue, with you, with all of you, our faces upturned, our bodies so close, electric in our aliveness and hope and desire, exquisite with our attention, our longing, our joy. I have to imagine the joy.

Hi friends. How you holding up? Thanks again for subscribing. Feel free to forward this to whomever you like. xodani