CAKE | 19 — How hard can it be?

For the first time in my life time does not feel linear. Apparently the pandemic has not only caused mayhem around the world but it has also interfered with the space time continuum. These days time is very stretchy while my personal radius has shrunk to a couple of neighbourhoods. A week feels like a day, nine months like three years or three days respectively, depending on the weather or whatnot. A trip to the local supermarket equals a transatlantic endeavour in preparation and execution since the place is always crowded, its aisles are too narrow even according to my pre-pandemic standards and I've recently begun loathing to shop for groceries anyway. On the other hand, my office downtown is about five km away but it might as well be around the corner from my apartment. It takes me about fifty minutes to walk there (I have not used public transport since the end of February) but an hour or so of being in my head is over in a flash. Getting stuck has altered my perception of time and space indefinitely. Taking a flight to Japan suddenly appears to be an inconceivable undertaking. I cannot believe that I've travelled there before. Far away countries have moved even further away, it seems. Our mental tectonic plates must have shifted.

The pandemic also makes me look at old photos of myself from a different angle. Though that might also be the first sign of old age creeping up ever so slowly. Soon I might start talking about the good old days when things were black and white and ... we had to walk for hours in a snowstorm to get to work, kids. Case in point, the latter will probably be a popular anecdote, sans the snow though, thanks to capitalism and its collateral damage called climate change. But I am diverting. Mom recently mailed me a letter with a photo of me from the early 2000s and I cannot help but think that the woman looking back at me must be somebody else entirely. Who is this person sitting in my old bedroom, next to my older sister? She has an awful haircut, heavily plucked eyebrows and she looks very tired, having just arrived back home after two years in the US. She has seen so many new faces, been to so many beautiful places, she's done so many hard and amazing things. She's been on her own, studying and working there and she's still scared shitless of what's ahead. Maybe she's already suspecting that one can never go home again. That she will forever remain detached from the places she inhabits, her life forever remaining off-kilter. Nonetheless her eyes are lit up and she's put on a defiant smile. As if she was wondering How hard can it be?

As strange as this person seems to me, her gaze is familiar. How hard can it be? is a question I have often asked myself, only to start something and to discover later on that it is indeed very hard, harder than I thought actually, fuck, what have I done kind of hard. But by then I am already in a deep dive, too stubborn to give up, convinced that I can in fact do really hard things. It's how I ended up waterskiing, pulling a UPS truck out of a snow ditch, smuggling joints from Amsterdam, landing a job at a renowned ad agency, shooting a .44 magnum, losing a tooth or studying Japanese. Fun times.

As distant as photos of myself feel, lately historic photos tend to generate an instant connection. The people in the photos are long dead, I’d never even met them, nor was I ever near the place these shots were taken. And yet it feels like I was right there with them, tagging along. I recently found a website with hand-coloured glass-plate transparencies from the Meiji era depicting life in Japan. They are from Yokohama, taken between 1908 and 1918 and they exhibit an eerie radiance. For all I care, some of them could have been taken this summer. One photo shows two geisha sleeping on the floor, next to their mattresses are various dishes with leftover food. The women seem to be wearing full make-up, their faces painted white and their hair styled into fancy updos. The everyday life of geisha appears not to have been very different from my pandemic days. Constantly on zoom calls for which I fix up my hair, put on too much concealer and try to keep up appearance by wearing what women's magazines refer to as a smart top, paired with joggers, only to crash on the couch hours later, with half eaten take-out containers and empty wine glasses to my side.

This year has been exhausting. All those hard things that I have done in my life did not prepare me for what ensued this spring, including the aftereffects of the pandemic. I still feel shell shocked, my ears ringing, my vision blurry. The most simple things still tend to overwhelm me. And yet. I cannot shake the feeling that a big shift is coming. Something's tilting. Not sure towards what. It's like the wind is suddenly blowing from a different direction. The air smells different, too. I can't see what's coming, I can only make out what's ahead if I close my eyes. But I am smiling. Joy is the ultimate act of defiance. And how hard can it be, really?