My Plague Year: Another Plague Year
“Another Plague Year would reconcile all these differences, a close conversing with Death, or the diseases that threaten Death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes, than those which we look’d on things with before” — Daniel Defoe.
I was thinking about how my personal plague year is drawing to a close. It’s never a thing neatly tied by the anniversary of a death. I don’t walk away from a graveyard as the sun rises behind me and the credits roll. Still, I felt in a way that I was looking forward. I still am.
And then the rug is pulled out from under me. My university course is derailed and everyone is ordered home. How strangely we live now, and how strange that we have accustomed to it so quickly. I spent the first two days on the sofa watching horror shows.
My husband asked me what it is about horror I like so much, because there’s enough horror in the world right now. The global pandemic is announced, and I rushed to the library before it closed and gathered armfuls of Stephen King. In The Stand, there’s a virus that wipes out most of the population, but people survive. Good triumphs, despite the horror. In the film version of The Mist, often declared one of the most pessimistic endings of all time, there is still a hope. Yes, particular characters die, but they are also discovered by others who have managed to avert the crisis. However dour a story’s ending is, there is still a hope, because without someone being there, there is no story. Horror shakes you up and spits you out, but the resolutions are always tidy. In many ways, it is the most conservative of all genres, apart from maybe crime. Better yet, metatextually, you put the book down or you turn the television off and the horror ends. And you go to bed and you can avoid the messy horror of the real world for a night.
I watched two seasons of Channel Zero, a horror television anthology by SyFy based on creepypasta, which is essentially digital folklore. In both seasons, the main characters deal with the death or estrangement from their parents. Their horror, once again, is grief. I was particularly interested by No-End House, where the horror is memory. Is it worth removing memory to live painlessly in facsimile, or a construct of happiness? Or is it best to keep those memories, to always remind yourself how you got to the place you’re at now? I rush between these emotions. Sometimes I want to remember the good moments with my father, and then the pain comes with it too and I think I can’t cope with that, so back into that black oozing box they go.
I read something on Twitter about how the government constantly cutting arts and culture funding. About how arts education is always mocked as being good for nothing. Yet now that people are at home, the one thing they are turning to is art and culture. One of the things they feel they miss the most is art and culture. There are people taking up playing the piano, or drawing to pass the time when they never used to think they had time. There are online writing courses, and online book clubs, and people ordering books online. There are even people watching things on Netflix they may never have considered watching before. It’s a hope we can come out on the other side a little softer, and attuned to what we need.
When my father died, I thought what I needed was plenty to keep me busy. Maybe for that moment, that’s exactly what I needed. Yet this past week has shown me what I needed was also a moment of pause. I just needed to be told by the government to stay at home in order to realise it. Once the world gets back to normal, there’s a balance in there somewhere, but for now it’s something I’m relishing. I’m not saying I have it all figured out, but there are things I have been turning to that have made me feel much better about my life and the circumstances of my past year.
I said it felt like I had the plague, and now it feels like everyone does, or could. I have moments to myself without the pressure of feeling like I need to be “doing” something with others. Last Saturday, we pretended to be at the cinema. I made popcorn and we watched Star Trek Beyond. Next weekend we’re pretending to go to the theatre, and the weekend after it’s a concert, and the weekend after that a virtual tour of a museum. I haven’t had this much fun in a while, and as clichéd as it sounds, it’s about the moment and not the money or travel or the getting dressed up and rushing around everywhere at every available free day.
I talked about trying therapy and personal training and all these things I thought I needed in order to cope with my grief. I’m realising the way I cope with my grief is mine, because it’s my own grief. The personal training made me miserable, and I had reached a point where I was enjoying exercise on my own terms. So I’ve gone back to that. I signed up for an online writing course and I realised I didn’t actually look forward to it and it wasn’t motivating me, so I made time to write by myself for the enjoyment of it. No submissions, no deadlines. I just want to write. That spark is coming back slowly, and that excites me. I unsubscribed from the writing course. I was struggling with a book and I realised it wasn’t, at this point, trauma or anxiety or grief stopping me, I just wasn’t enjoying the book. I picked up another book instead. I may not be reading 100 pages a day still, but at least I’m reading something I enjoy.
I have a few more things to say about my Plague Year, maybe until Easter, which rounds out my Plague Year neatly, the way writers often like things. There are things I want to talk about in relation this real-life plague that is coronavirus, and how I cope, but I also feel enough of that is being shared online on a minute-by-minute basis. Although there’s only so many “Day 6” memes I can take.
My plan was to talk about exile next, and maybe that fits in too. In a wider way. I can still talk about grief and I can talk about being stuck in the house, but I can also talk about language, and the way I navigate the world. I can talk about borders and identity and heritage and movement. So I think that’s next.
Stay safe, which has become the new ‘yours sincerely’.
