The World That's Coming

I remember when the Gulf War started, and I was 16, I think, watching news reports endlessly with a sense of confusion and anxiety: what was happening? Why was it happening? Was this the start of another world war? Would it ever end? Although I was years away from being 18, I imagined a world where National Service — the British version of the draft — was reinstated and I went to war, entirely unprepared and unwilling, unable to avoid it. It was a nihilistic time, not least because I was 15 and didn’t know any better, but the war war war of the media at the time felt like it was projected directly into my brain, and I didn’t know what to do about any of that. (What I did was start reading Kurt Vonnegut; so it goes.)

I thought of that this past weekend, waking up on Saturday and finding out that the US had launched a war with Iran while I was asleep. Relaunched a war with Iran? Rebooted it? Whatever you want to call it; it feels like the US has been at war with Iran for years and this is just the latest episode. It was at once unthinkable and entirely unsurprising, and left the same pit of confusion and anxiety in my stomach that I felt more than three decades ago.

I spent much of Saturday looking at the news, checking back in over and over as if doing so would somehow uncover a layer of common sense and morality I knew wasn’t really there. It wasn’t as if anyone in the US Government was going to suddenly realize they were breaking international law and care about it, after all, and even if they did, what could be done about what was already happening? It’s not as if an apology and promise not to do it again was possible. There’s no use crying over split milk, or hundreds of dead kids because you bombed a school, as they saying famously goes.

There’s an element of political watchers who look at what’s going on and say, the cruelty is the point, or he’s only doing this to distract from the Epstein files, and both of those things are almost certainly true and I understand that, but also — there’s a point where you have to ask yourself how much that matters, in the practical sense. Whatever the motives, however bad and inhuman and cynical they certainly are, people are dying and it’s 1991 again, 2003 again, and on, and on, and on.

Occasionally, I think about my relationship with death, and how unusual it seems to be compared with almost everyone else I know. I talk to friends, to peers, and it strikes me that I became aware of mortality younger than they did, or at least personally acquainted with it in a way that most people are lucky enough to wait decades for. (This is neither a boast, nor a humblebrag; I’m not sure it’s anything good in any way, really.)

All of my grandparents were dead by the time I left high school, for example; half of them were dead by the time I entered high school — maybe three-quarters of them? The timeline of my life feels moveable and shifty before I hit, say, 15 or 16; I remember that things happened here, but they actually took place a year earlier, or two years before that. I had a head start, though; my father’s father had died, back when my father was a kid himself. The Second World War was cruel, that way.

I remember my mother’s mother dying when I was a kid, not because of the event itself but because my oldest sister’s reaction was so big and dramatic that I felt at sea; I couldn’t really comprehend what had happened, but I looked at her and thought, is that what it’s meant to be? Should I act like that? In reality, I didn’t feel that depth of loss, that shock and numbness until the last of our grandparents died years later, with me in my final year of high school and her tripping outside our house, falling and splitting her head open on the pavement. Her being taken to hospital and all of us waiting to hear the bad news in a room from a doctor who told us as if it was weightless and meaningless, just a minor update that pulled the floor out from under us.

But at that point, I’d known someone far closer to my age — a friend of that same sister — who got cancer and died, so I already knew that death wasn’t something that stayed close to older people. Within a handful of years, one of my own friends was dead after surgery failed to save her; the friend who passed on that news was dead himself not too long after.

Both of my parents were dead before I was in my 40s. (Before I was even in my mid-30s, shockingly.) I think about that sometimes and feel this strange sense of sadness towards the me I was then, because even then I’m not sure I knew how to navigate any of that, the decimation of the upper echelons of my entire family. I wish they’d lived to see what happened to me, to my sisters, to everyone. I wish they could see me now.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, there was the time when I was in art school and a doctor accidentally told me I had leukemia and it was likely fatal, even though it wasn’t true. (A botched test was to blame; I found out the truth before too long, but we’re talking weeks rather than hours.) Having that weight on me, suddenly aware of how short all of the time was, all of the time.

All of this comes to mind as I read a book where the author talks about having to deal with loss for the first time in their early 40s, and it feels impossible to consider, to me. How could you get to that point in your life before knowing just how fragile we all are, when it comes down to it?

I am not an Olympics person, for the most part. I’m not even a sports person, beyond a vague oh, is that happening, I hope the team I feel the slightest allegiance to do well I guess feeling during something like the World Cup (soccer edition); I’m lacking the DNA that makes me able to pay attention for entire competitions and remain engaged for that entire time. They’re doing their thing and they’re doing it well and I’m impressed by that but I’m afraid I’m not going to be watching it, sorry.

That said, I am a sucker for a good story, so after Alysia Liu won gold for figure skating and it prompted all manner of discourse about the fact that she’d previously retired from figure skating (at 16!) and then un-retired after she realized that she actually enjoyed the skating and just didn’t like all the pressure that surrounded it, only to come back and win on her own terms, I thought, huh. I want to go see her performance now.

Here’s the thing: I don’t get figure skating, per se. I mean, I understand the mechanics of the sport and that skaters get graded on specific moves and such, but I don’t understand why one thing that looks impressive and graceful and beautiful to me is marked lower than someone else’s performance because of some nuance I can’t see… so I kind of went into the video thinking, I hope it’s fun. And then I realized she was dancing to Donna Summer’s disco version of “MacArthur Park,” and I thought, fun achieved.

More than that, though, there’s a genuine infectious joy in her performance — she seems to be enjoying herself and playing on the ice, to the point where I found myself laughing along with her as I watched. Who doesn’t want to see someone loving what they do, and doing it so well, after all?

A day after I saw the performance, someone linked to this post-win interview with Liu, where she says the following: “The thing is, what I like to share about myself is, my story, my art and my creative process… And I guess messing up doesn’t take away from that. It’s still something. It’s still a story. You know, a bad story is still a story. And I think that’s beautiful. So there’s no way to lose.”

There’s something in “a bad story is still a story” that’s going to echo around in my head for awhile, I think. If it’s an attitude that can make you win Olympic medals, what else can it do?

For someone who loves love as much as I do — as much as I, ironically, hates the “Oh, I love love!” declaration that seems to have become popular in pop culture in recent years; I am a walking contradiction — I’m struggling to think of a Valentine’s Day that’s ever felt particularly special to me in all of my years.

That’s not to say that I haven’t tried throughout the years, or that I’ve not had nice Valentine’s Day or even good ones; I’m not claiming that I’ve never had a good date on one, or anything like that. (I’m lucky enough to have had many, in all my years, something that I think would have surprised the teenage me who always felt a little abandoned and alone on the day itself, getting no cards and feeling unloved by the world at large. Oh, to be able to go back in time and tell him that wouldn’t always be the case…!) It’s just that they’ve been just that, nice and good, and never these big romantic overwhelming events that pop culture stores show on the regular basis that overwhelm and redefine our lives.

For a long time, that bothered me. Well, perhaps bothered is putting it far too strongly, but it left me wanting and feeling as if I was missing out: What was I missing, what was I doing wrong, that Valentine’s Day would come and go and there would be a good date but no massive emotional revelation? Never mind the fact that I couldn’t actually imagine what that would look like — something that, all things being equal, should have made me think, oh, am I falling for a sales pitch for something that doesn’t really exist — I felt as if I was missing out on something that would make me supernaturally happy and fulfilled emotionally like in all the movies, and throughout my teens and my 20s, I’d end the day just that little bit let down.

I can’t remember at what point I realized that the nice and the good was the point, that those were the Valentine’s Days (and dates) that I’d remember and were meaningful, but I do remember talking to Chloe at one point early in our relationship when we couldn’t get a reservation at a specific restaurant on February 14th and her gently suggesting that I was still putting too much effort into a random day and date when any other day would be just as good to show and celebrate love. And probably with more success with restaurant reservations. Old habits die hard, no matter what we tell ourselves.

Still, good luck tomorrow to everyone, anyway.