Are We in the After?
I hear your question, “How are you feeling?” and see that you expect an answer. I’d be happy to help but, truth is, I’m stumped.
It isn’t that I feel nothing. It’s that I feel everything: fury at the Republicans’ blasphemy, their smug winking at lies, and the soothing contentment of snuggling with my granddaughter. I’m not lacking in feelings. I just don’t know which one will come visiting next.
As my pandemic-inspired isolation has lifted, I’ve begun to wonder if life as I once knew it has been smuggled to some foreign shore. Is there really no going back? I’m feeling “the disorientation of being pulled out of one world and back into another” (Morgenstern). But I’m not at all sure of myself in either world, nor am I sure which world I should inhabit now.
So you ask how I’m feeling. The truth is, this is how I feel: I feel like the “man who awakens in his own house and finds all the furniture rearranged, so that every familiar nook and cranny looks foreign now. Disoriented, he has to reevaluate his surroundings, reorient himself” (Hosseini, The Kite Runner).
I’m trying to reorient myself to this world — to a world I’ve never known before, a world in which I’m uncertain of nearly everything. I hadn’t imagined that it would be this way.
