Pompeii, or: The Things That Persist
This was the very last picture I took of our apartment on the morning of March 16, as we were getting ready to leave New York. I wrote a lot of words in this skylit room during the two years it was my office.
You might already know this (and if you do, you’ve already appreciated the irony) but our original plan for 2020 was to travel the world. Andrew and I were going to spend a year backpacking. Our open-ended itinerary was going to begin in Madrid on March 25, 2020. We were going to be nomadic and spontaneous, taking lots of planes and trains and buses, hanging out in crowded restaurants and jam-packed tourist destinations, basically taking 2020 as our chance to come into contact with as many people as possible: great idea, right???
By the time we decided to cancel our trip, that first week of March, we’d already given up our apartment, and with numbers skyrocketing in the city, we decided it was a good idea to go ahead and get out of dodge. So we packed up our stuff, and drove up to my parents’ house in Rhode Island, a place that we were lucky enough to call our sanctuary for the months that followed. During those months, our stuff sat in a spare room in their basement, quiet and untouched, save for the few boxes of clothing and the handful of creature comforts (like my beloved Nespresso machine; Nespresso, please sponsor me!) that we did decide to unpack.
I think it will take me a long time to make sense of 2020. Almost nothing went according to plan, and yet the year has been filled with the most unlikely grace notes. It’s a year in which I’ve realized, over and over again, how incredibly fortunate I am. When people ask if we’re disappointed that we didn’t get to travel, my answer is: well, of course, it would have been wonderful to see the world. But it’s hard to feel too upset or aggrieved when the entire planet—literally, the entire planet!—had their expectations for 2020 upended. In an alternate universe, we might have been traveling through Japan or Australia or Peru or Argentina right now. But in this universe, we’re back in New York City, with a lease on a new apartment, settling in for a quiet winter at home.
Do I wish we’d had the chance to travel the world? Sure. Do I think we might eventually get the chance to do it, someday in the post-vaccine future? Sure! Am I letting myself daydream about that future yet? I don’t know. I can’t decide. This last act of 2020 feels so strange. We’re looking back on a year that none of us expected (minus, I guess, the scientists who were already getting worried in December 2019). There is hope on the horizon, but normalcy is still a long ways off.
And if I’ve learned anything from this year, it’s to avoid getting too caught up in the future. Right now, this is where I am: Back in the old neighborhood, a neighborhood which has been our home for over a decade now, remembering how much I love New York. We moved into the apartment just over a week ago, and while the actual physical space is new to us, the broader experience is like a homecoming; a reunion, too. Ripping tape from the boxes that we packed back in March, lifting glasses and bowls from their nests of bubble wrap, deciding what goes where in the kitchen. March feels like yesterday, but it also feels like a different lifetime. In years past, moving from apartment to apartment, we’ve always packed and unpacked in a short span of days, and so our possessions—the furniture, the pots and pans—create a certain continuity. This time, with most of our stuff having lived inside boxes for the past nine months, reencountering these possessions gives me a slightly spooky, Pompeii-like feeling.
A few days ago, I was sorting through our box of dried spices, putting them away in our new pantry. The cinnamon and cardamom had shattered at some point during the move, and the box was a mess (although it was also kind of magical to open the box and be greeted with this intense, delicious, hunger-inducing fragrance). We’ve had a lot of those spices for a long time—too long!—and sorting through and cleaning off each jar was like a miniature form of time-travel. The spices from Fairway dated from our apartment on East 84th Street, circa 2013 to 2017; the spices from Agata & Valentina dated from our apartment on East 77th Street, circa 2011 to 2013. (I know, I know! I’ll replace them eventually, I swear!) A version of me bought that fennel seed back in 2012 or 2013; another version of me holds that fennel seed here in 2020; and how surreal that, despite everything that has changed in my life, despite everything that has changed in the world, I still possess this same little jar of fennel seed.
Over the last few months, this has been a recurring theme. I am grateful for the most mundane things during the pandemic. Like in September, when I went to the dentist and got my hair cut for the first time during Covid. In that ultra-bleak stretch of late March and early April, when it really seemed like everything was crashing down, part of me imagined I might never get to do those things again. Maybe I would never see my dentist and my hairdresser again. Who could say?! If the world was ending, what could you really count on? (Yes, as a writer, sometimes my imagination runs away with itself.) But then, eventually, the infection rate subsided, and the dentist reopened, and the hair salon reopened, and it was safe to do those things again. As I sat there, getting my hair cut, getting my teeth cleaned, I thought: I can’t believe I’m really doing this. Why did I ever take it for granted?
It’s not just the box of spices. Unpacking our stuff—and more broadly, coming back to New York—induces dozens of tiny memories, and tiny hopes, each day. Here are the fancy wine glasses, which we used to use at dinner parties; here is the big wooden cutting board, perfect for holding too much cheese; here are the dresses and heels and blazers, which I plan on wearing again someday. Here is the jazz trio that still plays in Central Park; here are the people who still work at my library; here is the same friendly barista at Starbucks. There are moments when the world strikes me as utterly unfamiliar, when the gulf between pre-Covid and post-Covid seems impossibly vast, when life feels cleaved into an entirely separate “before” and “after,” but lately I take so much pleasure in reencountering those continuities, those little bridges—mundane and sacred at the same time—which connect us to both the normalcy that came before, and the normalcy that is yet to come.