You wake up feeling dirty, like a sock. Your heart is sore. The world isn’t fitting inside of the world. You aren’t fitting inside of yourself. You nearly throw the bluetooth speaker onto the floor when it won’t hook up to the record player, and when it finally does, you decide to put on the White Album, and when Paul McCartney starts screeching out HONEY PIIIEEEEEE you feel worse.
You sit on the couch, trying to think of funny ways to describe the feeling. The phrase “six shots of depresso” runs through your head first, then a couple of other, less punchy lines. It’s the punchiness you’re going after, though–the caffeine. You feel like a black cloud buzzing with an energy you can’t place, because it lives in so many crises, all unfolding at once.
You call your representatives, then you make Annie’s mac and cheese for the fourth time in two weeks, then you read a few chapters of White Noise, a book you haven’t thought about much since college. In these chapters, Babette is confessing to Jack that she is, in fact, taking the mysterious pharmaceutical called Dylar that he found taped to the radiator, and also the reason for it.
“I’m afraid to die,” she said. “I think about it all the time. It won’t go away.”
H. has therapy at noon, so by the pandemic rule you created when both of you went online with your therapists, you leave the apartment. Not knowing where to go, you walk towards the park. It’s in the park that you realize that writing will probably help, but you feel anxious about hitting the nerve of the feeling you’re experiencing, so when you do sit down to do it, you start in the second person and stay there.
It’s the week after daylight savings time: officially, the shittiest week of the year. The sunrise and the sunset come at weird in-between hours, straddling the hemispheres, sapping energy you would otherwise be able to wrench from either side. Soon it’ll either be day or it’ll be night.
What is nice about this time of year, in Brooklyn at least, is that it’s peak fall foliage. In the park, you are mesmerized by what’s happening around you. You take the bridle path, and it’s the middle of a Thursday, so there aren’t many people around, and the leaves are just…
You think about the classist trope about people carrying yoga mats telling their sad, indoor-variant type friends to “just go outside, you’ll feel better,” and for a second, you feel like a caricature for feeling just a little less depresso standing there–even though you yourself have walked around this park before and felt inconsolably fucked up the entire time.
You walk further into the woods, and it’s like someone set it up for a movie: the sun is gleaming, cast in red, orange, burnt orange, crimson, yellow, brown, yellow and brown, every color and combination that fits under the umbrella of “warm,” and leaves that are still green, which glow greener against the backdrop. It’s the kind of image that underlines why humans believe in God, in some unseen benevolent cosmic construction behind everything. You feel stupid doing it, but you take out your phone to take photos. Later you discover all your shots are accidentally Live photos, so they wobble a little bit at the edges every time you scroll to a new one, which is accurate to the experience of standing there, looking up.
You first encountered White Noise in an American lit class sophomore year. The professor of that course, almost definitely an adjunct, taught only male writers, and Don DeLillo was the one you liked. You remember sitting on the lawn in front of Landis Hall reading, getting caught on the dense, technicolor language DeLillo used to describe his characters.
It was in college that you first lived in a place with leaves that changed in the fall. You would walk around campus listening to the sound they made under your feet, separating yourself more and more from all your previous selves.
What a privilege to age—to see your own transition through.
In the park, it occurs to you that this era, the present one, is so strange partially because the weather that provided that clean break, that transition into a new self, is becoming increasingly unreliable. Warmer days and unpredictable precipitation cycles affect the changing of the leaves, affect their longevity, the strength of their colors.
In fact, it is a permacrisis. Multifaceted, ongoing, state-sanctioned, mutually affected and affective.
You come across dozens of osage oranges, strewn across the leaf litter like giant, prehistoric tennis balls. There was a time that the internet was fostering the rumor that osage oranges were eaten primarily by now-extinct pleistocene-era mammals in order to explain why the fruit is always rotting on the ground this time of year. You take out your phone and google “what are those big lumpy green fruit on the ground dinosaur” and find out that the theory lacks empirical evidence. You also find out that many people who google the osage orange ask: “What is the osage orange good for?”
As you pass under the walking bridge, you discover a $5 bill in your pocket, and you consider spending it on a fancy coffee in case the fanciness makes you feel less terrible. Instead, you go for a $2 can of soda from your neighbor, who stands by the path selling drinks and snacks.
“It’s so warm,” you say as you hand her the money, because it is, and because you need someone you barely know to make things feel normal for a minute. Your neighbor nods and tells you that even though she’s Jamaican she loves cold weather, and you tell her that you were born and raised in Florida and feel similarly. “But I guess this is what it is now,” you add.
She nods. “It is. It is. And I don’t like it, but we’ve got to accept it, and be grateful.”
“I do want to die first,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. I’m terribly afraid. I’m afraid all the time.”
“I’ve been afraid for more than half my life.”
“What do you want me to say? Your fear is older and wiser than mine?”
“I wake up sweating. I break out in killer sweats.”
“I chew gum because my throat constricts.”
“I have no body. I’m only a mind or a self, alone in a vast space.”
“I seize up,” she said.
“I’m too weak to move. I lack all sense of resolve, determination.”
“I thought about my mother dying. Then she died.”
“I think about everyone dying. Not just myself. I lapse into terrible reveries.”
“I felt so guilty. I thought her death was connected to my thinking about it. I feel the same way about my own death. The more I think about it, the sooner it will happen.”
“How strange it is. We have this deep terrible lingering fear about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from one another, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it?”
You walk along the edge of the drive for a few minutes, finishing your soda. The flavor is intense–saccharine, chemical–and your inner child loves it. Then, at the creek, you stop to watch not one or two but five female northern cardinals flit through the trees. One lands on an overhanging branch; one behind her flies past her and lands on a bush a little farther ahead; and so on. Like this, as a group, they make their way from plant to plant, chirping, possibly looking for berries or seeds, possibly playing, possibly just trying to get somewhere together. You think about how northern cardinals weren’t present in New York City for most of the mid 20th century. Now, because of cleaner air, the prevalence of bird feeders, and a warming climate, their borders are moving further and further north.
The drive, which loops its way through the park, used to be open to car traffic, which, as you watch joggers and bikers wind through the foliage, is unimaginable. The fact that you can’t even picture the cars now makes everything feel a little lighter for a minute. You concoct potential future unimaginables–vacant high rises, parking lots, lawns, occupation–then you repeat the words to yourself like a mantra. Vacant high rises. Parking lots. Lawns. Occupation. Vacant high rises. Parking lots. Lawns. Occupation.
This mantra, your creation, pulls up in your mind a section of a poem by Asiya Wadud:
for whatever
was coming
we were to
live through it
for whatever
was coming
we were to
live with it
for whatever
was coming
we were to
live in it
—the interconnectivity of nature and the city, here and there, freedom and violence and justice and peace, and us to one another, which makes it therefore our mutual responsibility.
See you in 2024.
One of many things worth sharing: Last week, Columbia University suspended student chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace for allegedly violating university policy by participating in a student walkout calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Learn more, including how to support the students, here.
Italicized lines from White Noise.
It’s our responsibility, our ability to respond, that must be nurtured. Your well written reflection makes that point. I think our response should emerge from our experience of the changes around us, and be formed by our vision of what’s possible. So I oscillate between reflection and “preflection”. You might enjoy this: https://lithub.com/on-the-false-promise-of-climate-fiction/