Here and there
Ever since the pandemic, my friends and I joke that time has lost all meaning. “March lasted a year and April went by in a week.” Now it’s September. We ask each other, “What day is it?” not so much to look for answers but to express our collective daze. Many of us are still quarantined, working at home, managing life without childcare, trying in our own ways to find the good things that have come out of this new normal. But despite our confusion, life keeps moving forward, indifferent of the world seeming to collapse around us. One friend adopted a dog. Another held a zoom wedding. A few of us had babies.
For me, time isn’t the only thing that’s been playing tricks. With quarantine and Zoom meetings, I’m slowly losing my sense of place. Yes, I live in Nashville. We live in the suburbs on the east side, surrounded by houses with lawn signs that used to say Warren and now say Biden and Black Lives Matter. Our neighbors are musicians who used to tour on a regular basis, and now do impromptu concerts on the lawn while live-streaming on Instagram. When I drive the boys to a park in another neighborhood, I pass by houses with Trump signs and cafes packed with tourists, all of them unmasked except for the waiters. I put the boys down for their naps and run to my desk, desperately scrolling through Twitter looking to connect with a world outside of my own. I’m looking for my New York friends and their friends and their friends. I’m looking for signs that say I’m not crazy, or even a quick gif that prompts a “like” and a silent laugh, or news that forces my shoulders to tighten, all the while trying to convince myself that it’s still important to keep up with the news. I slowly rewrite the novel I’ve been trying to write for years that takes place in Tokyo in 2011, while adding a few sentences to another document that might be something one day if I ever locate the story’s motive. The boys nap for two hours but I’ve written exactly two sentences and I feel like I’ve only gotten a minute to breathe.
At night, I video chat with my mom in Tokyo, where it’s 14 hours ahead and it’s early in the morning for her. It’s been 13 years since I moved to the States on my own, so I’m accustomed to doing this mental calculation in my head every time I call her.
As much as I limit my toddler’s screen time at night in order to “train his body to relax before bedtime,” I’m unable to fall asleep without my eyes glued to the smartphone, binging a show by muting it, putting in subtitles, and playing it at twice the speed. By the time my eyes are closed, I’m hardly aware of what time it is or what position my body is in. It’s largely intentional. I’d rather not know. I tell myself: If I knew it was 1 a.m. when I went to sleep, I’d be more tired when I woke up at 6. I’m also waking up a couple times a night to nurse the 4-month-old, but my body is on autopilot, and thankfully this baby never cries, only coos, and goes back to sleep without a fuss.
I’m sure there’s a yoga teacher out there right now who might read this and say: Take a break from screens. Stay focused on what’s in front of you, on what’s present.
While I agree, and I do believe that everything is better in moderation, I can’t help but think that my state of time-and-place limbo is not really about screens. If anything, the present moment feels like the thing that’s not physically here, because none of us are physically connected other than the members of our bubble. When I’m with my kids, I’m with my kids. But regardless of my eye contact and my intention to “stay in the present” as I pretend to be a dinosaur for the boys, my mind is in Tokyo with my mom, in New York browsing books I’ll never read, in the memories that keep coming back in flashes to remind me of joy, of ideas, of scenes from movies that define me, that tell me: I’m also a person, outside of this body pretending to be a dinosaur eliciting laughter from the little bodies that this body created.
I read this back and I can’t tell if any of this will make sense to anyone.
Right now, it’s a Saturday morning and Jin’s taken the boys to a park so that I could have a few hours to myself, which I’ve used to do this. I’ve opened all the windows to let in the air, which isn’t humid for the first time in months, and I hear the cicadas that sound identical to the ones near my parents’ home.
Every once in a while, a friend will say, it must be hard to live so far from home.
When I video-chat with my parents, we never say “I miss you” because we don’t really do that in Japan, and because even if we were to say it, it would be too much, too painful, too obvious. The last time I spoke with my mom, we talked about how we have more meaningful conversations now that we talk in concentrated spurts, once a day, compared to when we’re sitting next to each other on her couch, watching TV for hours mostly in silence. In an ideal world, we’d have both. We’d be able to hug and talk about meaningful things. In this world, we get the latter. At least in my mind, I’m also there, on that couch with her.