The World That's Coming

I think I mentioned a couple of time that I burned out in February and March — I got exhausted and sick and, around the time of Super Tuesday and the coronavirus really making itself felt, I reached a peak of frustration with… well, the internet in general. By which I mean, really, social media and news reporting, which are my two primary uses for the internet beyond “having a job.” (That both are heavily related to my job is neither here nor there, except that it is, of course.)

I was, at that time, just done with seeing the same self-righteous and utterly inane arguments day after day after day, each one completely convinced of its own ideological purity and unwilling to imagine compromise as anything other than betrayal. There was a level of confidence that dipped into arrogance in, it felt like, every single statement everyone made, and I couldn’t take it. I wanted to walk away from the whole thing. The internet? I wanted to melodramatically declare, It’s not for me.

Cut to now, when the internet has become everyone’s lifeline in these surreal times.

I’m far from the first person to ask you to imagine the coronavirus if the internet didn’t exist; by the time you’re reading this, I don’t doubt that I’m far from the fiftieth.  But this entire experience, with everyone closed in and reaching out virtually to interact with the world around them — be it through social media, using Google Earth to visit places in the world that aren’t their homes, or Netflix and Hulu or whatever for just the barest glimpse of human contact and the sound of other people’s voices — feels as if it it’s redefined the purpose of the internet once again, underscored it’s importance in so many lives.

I know that I’m one of those people. Not only has my need for up-to-the-minute news grown with everything that’s happened, but so has my need to hear other voices during everything. See others getting through this, or struggle with the things I am, or find humor where I can’t. The whole thing.

It’s an unexpected, selfish silver lining of everything, that my faith in the internet has been restored by watching it be the lifeline I always secretly believed it was. At this time, I’m taking every silver lining I can find.

There’s no such thing as a cursed email, I know this on a rational level. But sometimes, our brains aren’t rational, especially these days, with everything that’s going on.

I’ve come to fear communicating with my ex-wife. “Fear” isn’t the right word, not exactly — dread, maybe — but it’s something I hate doing, something that leaves me feeling nervous and sick ahead of time, and anxious and upset afterwards. I’m not entirely sure why, beyond the feeling of disdain present in every interaction — the continued feeling that she will instantly dismiss or disagree with anything I have to say, purely on the basis that I said it, through an increasingly brittle face of faux politeness. After every time we communicate, I feel like shit. The accumulation of almost two decades of emotional abuse still working its way through my system, I guess.

It’s become clear to me that she’ll choose the path of spitefulness wherever possible in the past few months; I took the dogs at the end of last year after she told me her dad was sick and she was going to visit him, only to discover her posting on social media about scuba diving in another state entirely with her fiancée; she then moved to California with the dogs weeks early without telling me, only informing me via email after the fact that she was starting her new life and they were there with her.

Legally, we share custody of the pups “by mutual consent.” When she told me, months earlier, that she was engaged and would be moving with the dogs, I pointed out that we had to discuss some kind of arrangement where we both agreed on how often we’d both see them; that’s what mutual consent is. “I don’t consent to anything that isn’t what I want,” she replied.

(I got the dogs for a few weeks in March. When it came towards the end of the agreed upon period, I wrote to her to say, “I should keep them for longer, there’s a pandemic and both our states are in lockdown, traveling would be dangerous and stressful, and they’re happy, healthy and thriving here.” She drove from California to Oregon to collect them anyway. So it goes.)

I realized that, because she and I filed joint taxes for the final time last year with what had been our shared house as the address — we’d agreed upon this because we’d started the year making advance payments jointly — this year’s weird, uncomfortable but also increasingly financially necessary stimulus check was likely to be addressed to both of us, and sent there. So, as much as I didn’t want to, I wrote an email saying, basically, when that check comes in, can you let me know and we’ll work out how to handle it. Her response was to tell me that she filed independently for 2019, so there would be no joint check.

I know, I said, my anxiety spiking, but they calculated everything based on 2018 taxes, so please, if and when the check appears, can you let me know. She repeated that she filed independently for 2019, and that I was wrong. That second email sat at the top of my inbox for a day, every other incoming email either junk or deleted, and every time I saw it, my stomach sank. There was something about it that felt ugly and cruel, somehow. Dismissive, disdainful.

I didn’t feel as if I could delete it or move it to a folder, as if it held some weird power that would hurt me if I tried; instead, I just hoped for new emails to come in and hide it. Like I said, there’s no such thing as a cursed email, I know this — but I’ve rarely felt happier to receive a battalion of work-related emails on Monday morning.

I read, somewhere, that people worldwide were having trouble sleeping during the self-quarantine era in which we’re currently living. I also read, somewhere, that people worldwide were having particularly vivid, almost lucid, dreams during the self-quarantine era in which we’re currently living. I’m not entirely sure that these things aren’t somewhat contradictory.

Neither one is necessarily true for me, right now, anyway. After a few weeks where I was sleeping poorly — for reasons that had far more to do with restless dogs deciding that they needed to go outside at 1am than anything to do with the virus — I seem to have rediscovered my ability to sleep incredibly well. In fact, not only am I sleeping more deeply than usual right now, I’m sleeping longer, as well; I’m waking up anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes later than where/when I’ve woken up since the Brazil trip, and I’m feeling more refreshed and relaxed, as well. Global pandemics are, it appears, good for my sleep cycle.

With the sleeping in comes something else new; I’m remembering my dreams (slightly) more.

I think it’s happening because, more often than not, I’m actually getting woken up by something external — the dogs, most mornings — and, therefore, getting woken up mid-dream, so they’re fresher in my head. This probably doesn’t stand up to scientific thinking, I’m sure, but it’s what I’ve got, and I’m sticking with it.

It’s particularly unexpected because… well, I feel like I haven’t really been remembering a lot of dreams in general for awhile. I’ve been told that this, the not remembering, is a sign of being in a good, relaxed headspace and getting comfortable sleep, and that might be true, but it’s particularly dull at the same time. Doesn’t everyone want to have a little insight into what their brain is thinking when they’re not using it…? Isn’t that something other people are curious about…?

What I’m remembering aren’t full stories, or even complete scenes. Instead, they’re feelings, glimpses of other things that honestly make a lot of sense right now: there’s a lot of traveling, being in different countries and just being outside, being amongst other people. The things that are impossible now, and which may in different circumstances feel exhausting or oppressive, but right now feel exciting and exotic. I dream of things that don’t exist anymore. This feels right, somehow.