Anhedonia

The flame and smoke of worries run the days. Every action of daily life turns into a grinding monotony of sameness, like a prisoner’s life. Halfway through the morning, the weight of fatigue tires me out, persuades me to change into a torn pajama. Unknowingly I repeatedly keep staring out the window wondering what happened, where all the hurried citizens went. All-day I keep doing the same. It is unthinkably grim wherever, whenever I look out from the kitchen, the living, or my bedroom windows. I see parked cars, trimmed front yards, colorful jacarandas, cloud-covered sky, but none are able to cheer me up. Sometimes I try to let fresh air inside my makeshift temporary workspace filled with a microphone, monitors, camera, and headphones. But the coolness of the breeze seems more interested in wick away any sign of singing leaving only a mournful cry. Everything seems brittle. When I try to write things down on a to-do list in my corner of the taut world, my calcium deprived old rusty bones make it hard even to sigh down onto a chair. Pain from heart spills over other body parts and makes a crescendo of agony. There is no end to the day because I never started the day as I have been for 55+ years. There is no separation between the start and end of my day; everything is in a Mobius strip. It keeps going back to the same starting point after a long trip to nowhere! There is only the deal I can strike with my anxiety, my exhaustion to get through the passage!

Sometimes I catch sight of my reflection in the window glass while looking out in Payne gray night. I see a haunting gaze looking back at me tiredly. I cannot fix what I imperfectly understand. And my understanding of surroundings fell short starting with the news of scarcity of masks and gloves for the healthcare worker. All my fixed idea about life, about how things should be has shattered into a million pieces. Lincoln’s prophecy: government of the people, by the people, for the people – fell from my grace. I could not convince my mind that the government was indeed for the citizen. How did I, how did we get to this point? There are only questions now. I can extract oil from a rose petal far more easily than find an answer: how did the US healthcare system run out of protective gear at the start of this pandemic and why the capitalists are unable to restock them quicker?

The shackled down affair and foggy awareness of what has been happening everywhere makes it hard for me to write. Does it matter at all if the last words, without loved ones near me in the hospital bed are going to be who is going to pay for this procedure? Many said these words on their death bed. Can you imagine how heartbreaking it sounds when I am contemplating this while living in the US? Does my ability to write matter now? Any fee based writing workshop pays dividend as readers in out of unwritten obligation than anything else of the platform.  Are they going to be the witness, the beneficiaries of the reasons for my writing life? It is a rude wake-up call, mayhem, and no comfort of hope or a beacon of warmth from the Klieg light of optimism from afar. Is this it? Can you hear half dread and half plea on behalf of scant sanity? I whisper if the madness of dysfunctional government, gluttony plagued corporations, an insensitive society towards the elders has always been there, or if it came on my watch but I ignored it until they became bleeding wounds, too serious, too difficult to ignore. Anybody who wanted to know what was happening could have known. Everything was there to know. But not everybody wanted to know. My guess, most of us preferred burying our head in the sand, and when we woke up, wrote our blogs, books, for workshops, etc. That is the way our life went, until the visit from the microscopic pathogen.

Before the start of the workshop, every single of the participants was good writers and artists. I do not challenge it. Because I was the one at the bottom of the totem pole and managed to pick up a little praise. So, we will continue writing, creating art after the workshop. But will those turn into tangibles to shape our absence? No one is getting out of this world alive! I should start to tear up my make-shift functional certainty. Shake off the false sense of security I built without challenging my perspective. Let go of the misunderstanding that I made my way through a night sky following constellations in fear of a sky crowded by stars covering the north star among them. I should have learned the wisdom of the north star, concentrated on what I did to change things, how I soiled my hand to protect my heirs, the shape of my absence.