How to End a Year Without Time

Come with me

Pages from Q’s first quarantine zine

The calendar said that 2020 began on January 1 like always, but the year had its own official start for each of us. Our kids’ school abruptly decided to close a day early in mid-March for spring break, and at the time we all thought we’d be back to something like normal when school resumed. Instead, M&Q, our high school son and daughter, launched their 2020 in their typical ways: That Friday the 13th of March, M was booked for a show with his band, and I remember being a little hesitant about letting him go. The original venue canceled, but they found another last minute and went on in front of a crowd that received a squirt of hand sanitizer at the door with their paid admission. Q wanted some craft supplies from Michael’s, and she and my wife and I took the subway to the store in Chelsea on Saturday the 14th.

That was the last subway trip for six months. The virus descended upon New York City, and we locked down. No one knew anything except that the hospitals started to get overrun and the curves turned exponential. Going to the grocery store or the pharmacy felt like an act of courage; working at one was (and still is) an act of heroism. The sound of ambulances became ambient, always there if you decided to listen for it and sometimes even if you didn’t. Q sewed masks from pillow cases, and we wore them when we went outside for anything, which was almost never. We were told that the best thing to do was to do nothing. Stay inside. Stay distant. We did.

April 2020 — the month Q turned 15 — saw the first peak of infections and deaths in NYC, and Q left our apartment exactly twice.

School came back in session after spring break but fully online in one flavor (largely asynchronous) and then another (zoom laden) when everyone realized that in-person instruction wasn’t feasible. Concerts dropped one by one (we had tickets to see Billie Eilish, and The 1975 with Phoebe Bridgers opening), including a big show with M’s band that could have drawn a bigger audience and likely bigger gigs. We had plans to spend much of the spring break in California, driving from San Francisco to San Diego to visit family and colleges for M and to look up at redwoods. Q was supposed to go to fine and performing arts camp in July, something she had been looking forward to from the moment she got home from it the previous summer. M was excited for his own summer experience at Berklee School of Music, five weeks with some of the best young musicians from across the country and a trial run at college life. We also were set to travel to Kansas to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday, a milestone he never thought he’d meet. But like most regular markers of an unfolding year, spring and then summer was slowly swallowed by a virus left largely unchecked by incompetence, unpreparedness, venality, and denial.

Time stopped and our lives contracted, but somehow our living did not. My wife and I tried to fold our work into corners of our apartment and found new ways to conflate life and work. Even now I’m astonished at the resilience M&Q showed during that time. M, stuck inside and unable to perform as scheduled, worked with a friend to write, record, produce, and release songs for streaming, trading audio files online and smoothing kinks over FaceTime. Q began making her way through lockdown, literally, by creating and mailing things to friends — letters and personalized zines. (The header image for this guide is from her first pandemic zine.) She started making daily collages in a notebook that has become a thick record of a life inside. She filled her room with photos of beautiful places, drew and painted and wrote.

It wasn’t easy. Still isn’t. The pandemic has revealed so many absurdities we had simply accepted. On the smaller end of the scale, school used to start at 8:15 am, but the pandemic day begins at 10 am, which better suits the rhythms of teen bodies. Trigonomtery, which Q basically had to teach herself, seemed like the least necessary thing in the world to be studying when our lives were plotted daily along more important curves.

Moving up the absurdity scale, M, a senior now, somehow continued the college-application process, despite visiting just a few schools nearby in person before they all closed themselves. Standardized testing dates were canceled again and again, and some colleges said they weren’t going to consider them, or wouldn’t consider them that much, or as little as they said they always did, although they vowed to retrain their admissions staff to consider them as little in the right way (or something). He wrote so many essays about how he loved to perform without being able to perform and while watching the entire music industry, particularly small performance venues, struggle and wither.

The biggest absurdities met you everywhere. Health care for so many people in the US is tied to employment, and massive job loss meant massive loss of health care when sickness was spreading, which meant some had to work even if sick because they had no choice. Essential workers — those working grocery and drug stores, cleaning, delivering food and mail, driving people afraid to board a train or bus — are often people of color, who were (and still are) getting sick and dying at alarming rates. So many dire problems with societal solutions that seem something like obvious: the federal government could make Americans’ lives better at a time when they can’t make them better themselves. But there never was a plan. So much loss, so much of it avoidable.

My memories of this time without time are impressionistic, episodic. I remember NYC’s lockdown-emptied streets suddenly filling with protests following George Floyd’s killing. I remember the deep struggled between wanting to participate, wanting to encourage M&Q to add their voices, and the existential fear of being near thousands of others even outside with masks. I remember worrying that M, always exploring on his bike in the warm months, would be gassed and kettled by the NYPD in a park or on a bridge as police became more and more aggressive against peaceful gatherings. I remember broken glass and boarded-up windows that became canvases for the names of those killed by cops. I remember burned-out cars upon which flowers suddenly appeared. I remember how the sounds of hovering police helicopters replaced the sounds of ambulances. I remember Q, who has always taken the virus extremely seriously, decided not to take to the streets even though she wanted to. I remember cheering healthcare workers out our windows at 7 pm as they changed shifts, and then seeing those same nurses and doctors cheering BLM marchers. I remember feeling scared and powerless and no longer sure how to calculate risk.

I remember committing myself to a productive lockdown. I would learn the circle of fifths on the piano, pick up the bass guitar, write a little and read more each day, finally finish drafting that book of personal essays I’ve been noodling around with for a while. I would emerge from this all this time a better person.

So many promises to myself, and I pretty much broke them all. I spent most days managing anger about all the stolen time, the incredible loss. I found myself waking from dreams of digging or fixing or building, of outside and working with my hands. I browsed seed websites even though we have no access to ground. I spent a good week researching the best pocket knife in hopes that I could be the kind of person that needed one. I ended up without seeds or a knife — I see now that my body was doing its best to pull me down off my galloping mind. My mind has gotten good at running.

Will I be nostalgic about 2020? Probably somewhat. We went from days where the four of us bumped into each other during busy mornings and busier evenings with events and work and friends. M, then a junior and now a senior, is supposed to be like a comet — a celestial thing with a lengthening orbit that we gather to watch pass by brightly and notably but infrequently. For nine months we have spent so much time together, dinner each night at the same table, listening to and playing music, reading the same books, adding volumes to our catalogue of inside jokes. We have cared for each other so consciously and up close, and it has been an unexpected gift.

I take a walk along the Hudson River, like I do nearly every day. The paths are alive with joggers dodging kids pointing from their strollers at geese on the grass. It’s a little warmer than it has been but still cold, still January, everything wet from a halfhearted rain. My mask keeps my breath close and my face warm. I find comfort now in covered faces. Wind picks up in this part of the city in winter, stirring the river’s surface, making it too busy for me to grasp. I’m always surprised by the audacity of life — how it is both so fragile and so durable, on occasion easy and then calling for vast effort. I’ve thought a lot lately, often without wanting to, about love and distance and the arc of my orbit, about all the powerful things I can’t see. I have been astonished, even this deep into my life, that I could have wants of such a power and size, that I could miss what I never had.

As much as we need it to end, disease and death and unrest continue such that the 2020 triggered in March doesn’t seem finished with us. No doubt 2021 will end differently: M will leave us, sent out into this broken world, and Q will need to renegotiate her truce with it, even with an effective vaccine and (hopefully) better government.

How do we do this? How can we end a year without time?

Come with me. Let us call this same terrible time by a new name, if only to end something so that we may have something to begin. Let us make our hearts so large that they can hold all the loss, the grief, the anger that they must, yet still have room for joy.

I don’t know if we will make it, but come with me.