A little bit of everything
Earlier today, after I’d rolled out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom to get ready for the day, I found myself listening to Bo Burnham’s Inside. When’s the last time you listened to that album? I don’t play it very often, but All Eyes On Me is such a jam. That song scratches a serious itch in my brain.
So I was making my way through my morning routine, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and mindlessly wing-tipping my eyeliner when Goodbye started streaming into my headphones; and I found myself stopped by the lyrics. For just a split moment, that song picked me up and out of my bathroom and plunked directly into the center of the fear, the uncertainty, the profundity of those early Covid days—those lockdown days when we were disinfecting our bags of Doritos, desperately searching store shelves for toilet paper, and discarding our jeans and button-downs in exchange for our cherished and beloved sweats—all whilst just outside of our respective front doors, people were dying in droves. For that singular split moment, it’s almost like I’d forgotten what it was like.
I hadn’t, of course. After all, how could any of us truly forget the visceral fear, the variable rate of daily trauma, and the endless unknowns as they commingled with our obsessive inspection and dissection of each cold symptom we ourselves or our children had on any given day?
So long, goodbye
I took a damp Q-tip to my mascara-coated eyelashes, and smoothed out the clumps.
I’ll see you when I see you
Almost perfect, but I missed a spot. Grabbed another Q-tip.
You can pick the street, I’ll meet you on the other side
Fuck. Almost 7 million recorded Covid deaths worldwide.
So this is how it ends…
I swear to God that all I’ve ever wanted was a little bit of everything, all of the time
A little bit of everything all of the time. A little bit of everything all of the time. I let the concept roll around in my mouth for a minute before it makes itself at home in me.
The Covid lockdown happened almost three entire years ago—remember it? It was that tiny little blip in time that was slated to be two weeks or so, but which proved itself to be just a wee bit longer. And here I sit in early 2023, finding myself so stuck between a clear understanding of exactly how that time has passed, and abject confusion about what time even is, how we got here, and what the ever loving fuck we’ve somehow managed to live through. When I scroll through photos on my phone, I scarcely remember so many of the moments… and yet, when I peer at my reflection in the mirror, I see the lines of time and trauma etched into my face.
Oh, shit.
Somehow, it’s both. It’s certainty and it’s confusion; it’s memory, and it’s the loss thereof. I can’t begin to make sense of this existence—not really, anyway—but, I wonder, perhaps that’s just part & parcel of the everything?