Strangers

I’ve been having insomnia lately. It started on the night of the election. I had so much anxiety about the results that I couldn’t stop watching CNN and refreshing the map, hoping that more states would turn blue. I finally went to bed around 11:30 that night, but tossed and turned for hours. I finally got up, went downstairs, and took a Klonopin from my stash of meds. I got back in bed and eventually calmed down enough to sleep.

The rest of the week, I was filled with anxiety. My friend Mina kept texting me that everything was going to be okay. I wanted to believe her, but I stress-ate leftover Halloween candy and couldn’t tear myself away from the news, Twitter, and that map. Now, weeks later, even though the results are in and Joe Biden is the president-elect, I still can’t fall asleep at night.

This pandemic has been fairly easy on me. I’ve stayed healthy. I am able to work from home. No one close to me has gotten sick. I’ve actually enjoyed the slower pace of life, not dealing with traffic, and rushing around every day. I’ve realized that I’m not the extrovert that I thought I was. I can’t complain at all. So I was not prepared for my reaction to the election. It stressed me out in a way I haven’t experienced in awhile. My best friend had called me out for being politically apathetic about a month before the election. I think that I’d been burying my intense feelings out of self-preservation. If I started to really think about what’s going on, how could I function?

For the first few months of the quarantine, I struggled to be able to read books, and to write. Now I devour books. I probably read three books a week. I took an online writing class in October and wrote every day for five weeks. Two books that I’ve read during this time that have stuck with me had similar themes. You Again by Debra Jo Immergut is about a woman in her forties living in New York City who one night sees a young woman on the street, only to instantly realize that she was seeing her 21-year-old self. She jumps out of her cab, and tries to talk to the woman, but gets the door slammed in her face when she tries to tell the young woman that she’s…her. The book describes how she keeps running into herself all over the city. She’s an artist who compromised her creative passions and ambitions to have a family and works at a pharmaceutical company as a graphic artist, designing the packaging for drugs. She tries to tell her younger self to keep her artistic passion, and not settle like she did. The novel has a suspense-thriller aspect to it, and I found it really gripping. What would I say if I could talk to my 21-year-old self?

The other book, You Were There Too, by Colleen Oakley is about a married woman who has been dreaming about a mysterious man since she was in high school. She gets married and then keeps having miscarriages when they try to have a family. Her dreams about this other man become more vivid and powerful. Then, one day she meets a man who looks just like the person from her dreams. They start running into each other all over town, and when they talk, she finds out that he has dreams about her, too, before they even met. They had been complete strangers. But she is married. What should she do? The story was moving, and I cried at the heartbreaking end, which is not typical for me.

I’ve also been listening to music, constantly, to get through each day, each minute even. One song that has captured me is called “Strangers Now” by The Slow Show, the first track off of their album Dream Darling. Imagine that Matt Berninger of The National and Tom Waits had a love-child. That’s what his voice sounds like. I can’t get this song out of my head.

Who's calling
Who's calling
Who's breaking your heart tonight?

Who's calling
Who's calling
Who's breaking your heart tonight?

Who are we now?
Who are we now?
Are we now two strangers now?
Two strangers, two strangers now?

Who's breaking up, who's getting down
Who's getting old, who's checking out
Who's breaking your heart tonight?
Who's breaking up, who's getting out,
Who's giving up, who's checking out,
Who's breaking your heart tonight?
Two strangers now.
Two strangers now.

Who are we now?
Who are we now?
Who are we, are we now, are we, now
Who are we now, are now
Who are we, are we, are we now
Who are we now?
Are we now, are we are we are we now
Who are we now, are we now
Are we are we are we now

Hold on to your lives,
Hold on to your lives,
Hold on, hold on, hold on tight
Hold on to your lives,
Hold on to your lives,
Hold on, hold on, hold on tight.

So, who am I now? Sometimes I feel like a stranger to myself. I never thought of myself as an introvert, but I’ve been sinking into myself this year. Holding on tight to my life. Lying awake at night, trying to will myself to sleep. Thinking about what I would tell my younger self if I had the chance. Dreaming strange dreams when I do finally fall asleep. Reading intense books that keep me up all night, wondering what will happen next. Having to take Klonopin to relax my brain. What’s breaking my heart tonight? The unrest in this country. The injustice of violence against people of color. Systemic racism. The caging and separation of children at the border. People dying in hospitals without their loved ones around. Single parents trying to make it with their kids at home and keeping their jobs, paying the bills. Half the country succumbing to the lies of the last four years. That’s what breaks my heart.

But I must hold on to this life. Hold on for my son, who can’t be alone anymore, during the pandemic. I stay with him every night in his bed until he falls asleep. It’s so peaceful to watch his eyelids flutter and fall. “Mama, don’t leave me,” he says. So, I hold on.