An Unnecessary Expression

“We must never forget about despair.”

—Anna Akhmatova

It’s been three long years of this, this life of nauseating terror in the waiting room we call Covid.

As people drop to the ground dead all around us, all ages, including the very young, “doing what they loved most,” we’re told, in the moment of sudden death, we’re been forced into complicity with it all. Complicity because we must carry on, amidst open genocide, we still go buy groceries, or maybe even occasionally a new piece of clothing. Clothing that suggests a festive moment, an attempt to trick the mind back to trivia, back to life before. Every garment is a mockery. Clothes on racks in stores have no energetic field around them. Everything looks the same but isn’t. How did they do it?

They worked with frequencies, I assume.

They began so long ago, flogging and inverting the best in us, shaming us for opposing our own extinction, which we were supposed to thank them for. We all had to get dragged into this algorithm of madness, because of their ‘virus’ obsession, which—do you believe me now—is insatiable. No amount of human sacrifice will ever sate it. A bunch of nothing people, who somehow pulled off 9/11 on steroids every day while we weren’t paying attention.

It can’t ever unhappen. The children found dead in their beds—

Who wants to even imagine what nurses witnessed on maternity wards, or how they came up with new language to deflect all normal reactions, all grief? Who will treat their trauma wounds, when admitting one felt trauma insults the architects of all this death, and we can’t have that. Through our muteness we must conceal crimes too big to speak of. All because they had to have their way with us, in the holy name of a virus psychosis so advanced it didn't even require a virus.

Passing lobsters in a tank in the supermarket with rubber bands around their claws, you no longer feel you have more freedom than they do, or maybe this is all karma.

What did we do?

Twice today I was asked: “Do you feel vindicated?”

Truth is I feel nauseous. And complicit. To have partaken in esoteric head games about “the science” or worried about the mean boys—issuing degradation to those who lack scientific fluency. Who can describe any of this? And to what end?

My Christian friend Tim from Texas made me pull over in Accord last year to pray for one of those mean boys when I fell under spiritual attack. “What do you think happened to him Celia, when he was a little boy?” he asked.

“I don’t care.”

“Yes you do.”

“I have to pull over and pray for him…now?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, alright.”

On an index card taped to the wall above my desk I have written:

”I shall not die, but live to declare the works of the Lord.”

Is despair failure, or is failure to despair failure?

I bought hyacinths for Mary and Vera last week and the next morning they both texted me a photo of their respective flowers in the morning, describing how fragrant they were. Vera called, and talked about the vase she was looking for, and for a brief moment, we were just two women talking about flowers, which had evaded the censors, and retained their strong fragrance, somehow.

In the restaurant I asked Mary what might be on the minds of all the upper west siders suddenly maskless. “Is it like…the thing was flying around the air but then it stopped because everybody got injected with stop-the-virus juice?” Mary confirmed their logic: “It used to be flying around in the air but now it isn’t.” Because now it isn’t, it means then, it wasn't, but never mind, the dance macabre must be halted without choreographic command, nor logic of any kind. Just say nothing. Lest they start again.

The waiters were so friendly, as though we were not prisoners in trouble anymore.

I passed the building I grew up in, windows dark. We no longer live there and my father died three months into this thing. “Celia don’t you see it?” he said. “They’ve destroyed the country.” I turned off the TV and barked orders we would never watch FOX again, only nature programs, BBC world, small penguins being tossed against cliffs by giant waves. I told him the hospitals were empty and he asked me to promise him not to pursue that story.

“Ok, I promise,” I said.

If only I could run up the stairs and fling the door open and run in to him, to tell him about this terrible dream I had.

“In America?” he would say, after I told him the whole dream.

“Yes, in America.”

To think we used to think communism was some kind of dengue fever that would never afflict us.

It was listening to Sasha Latypova’s interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that set this off. Please don’t tell me I’m being dark. I know it.

I promise to lighten up.

I just miss everybody.

Presumably Sasha is Russian, and that’s what made me search out an Akhmatova poem. (Update: Just learned Sasha is Ukrainian.)

We don't know how to say good-bye
We wander on, shoulder by shoulder.
Already the sun is going down.
You're moody, I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church and watch
baptisms, marriages, masses for the dead.
Why are we different from the rest?
Outdoors again, each of us turns his head.
Or else, let's sit in the graveyard
On the trampled snow, sighing to each other.
That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
In which we shall always be together.

—Anna Akhmatova

The conversation continues here, here, here and here.