the distance diaries
In challenging times, art and literature can serve as a refuge, as a roadmap, and as a way to bear witness to the cultural, political, and social events that surround us. With most of us tucked away in our homes across the globe, we’re pleased to share a special edition of Siblíní Journal: The Distance Diaries.
We are adding submissions to this edition on a rolling basis—keep checking back to follow along as our writers and artists share work.
Silencieuse by Betsy Neis
canning by claire oleson
This one’s just Ohio, okay. Summer Ohio and a few years ago. And there was a man who’d shot his son in our small (honey, pinprick) college county and he’d gone away on his bike and they hadn’t got him and I was walking home, between two apartments, this: a sticky, terrible night alone with my pocket knife which, yes, I’d unhinged but also, yes, was still buried in my pocket as a way of telling myself that I knew the man on his bike must be so sad and fast and maybe even gun-less, by now, that to have a knife out was to be unkind to the stress of having killed your son. I’m sure it was stressful. The one sheriff had his one vehicle and it was always slow. Think: syrup from maraschinos down a bookcase, ruining. It got caught up. It let things get away on bikes. Syrup on books is perfect at not catching up with bikes; I’ve seen it not do it a million times.
This one’s just a look back at an Ohio summer. I never call anything honey because I’m smaller than most things and calling honey up at something sits in my mouth dumb. Also, it’s so condescending to act in love with what you aren’t in love with, to be so affectionate when saying honey is usually followed by asking for something. So I was walking back and hoping the night was all sleep and nowhere was it saying to itself “gun gun gun.” I had to go back because I was house-sitting which I love to do and there were two dogs in that house and they needed things in order to keep being dogs and I said yes, I’d do those things. So the knife out, but pocketed, contained, succinct.
This is just a slurry about a rural edge and murder and, listen, such a wide, hazy night with an absolute calm so wide that I could have seen myself dying in it. I think that I am dying way more than I am actually doing any dying. I drag my body out for myself and point where I think it’s ending. I have been wrong so far, as wrong as cocktail fruit liquid ruining an edition of the collected Woolf is wrong when it says “I’ll catch the bike and its man, too.” But still, I decide I am dying. I decided I can be dying on calm, empty, deep-water-dark nights where, nearing one AM in a summer-emptied college town, I am sure I am being pursued by a man shifting gears and hoisting a wobbly gun as he strides through the pedaling motions. I am not. He is not. He is caught. Or not even that, exactly. He turns himself in and goes away. Still, I am on my way home to dogs and I’m dying and the knife I have is a little exclamation point I keep to try and end my own sentences but I’ve never used it and it’s just, frankly, cute to hold it so hard when there’s nothing wrong. I am embarrassed that I think how I think, that I hold things the way I do.
The summer that’s coming to us will have dying in it. It will be a lot more potent than the night I jarred my fear in. Actually, I think Ohio might be doing a decent job of fending it off (comparatively, honey, there’s no one catchable biking in this.) Though this might be different by the time of publication. So I don’t say honey and I don’t write about past relationships because it feels way too containing, reductive, and I wouldn’t want it done on me. Anyway, that summer she shaved part of my head in the breezeway, honey, of a dorm while it was raining hard and they still didn’t know where that man was but I wasn’t dying, despite the knives on my neck doing work. Right after, I got up from the metal folding chair and went to a lit up house and showed a bunch of grown men I’d known for a week what I’d asked to have removed from my head so they might smile at it and then I left and went to bed while two dogs shifted in their own watering darks.
Right now, I’m in an epicenter in Brooklyn, two blocks from a hospital and I am not holding a knife up and I’m not falling for a girl the summer before I leave Ohio for a year. My undercut has grown out is a terrible sentence to write. It’s like calling someone honey or writing about a good ex or handing a bottle opener to your poetry professor; who would do any of this, would be so hypochondriacal as to make recurring (but benign) heart palpitations into the prologue for a heart attack they think they will have. I have not had a heart attack, I only have a left ventricle that talks on its own sometimes, I’ve not put a knife in anything, I’ve been good to the dogs, got them what they needed to be dogs longer. I’ve made a cardiologist look at me and tell me that my heart works for me, not against, and then asked me, have I considered going on anti-anxiety meds and the whole time, his face was tired. His face was holding up its exhaustion with me, to me. My heart scares me for a few reasons: one is that cortisol, a stress hormone, pops up when you get palpitations. This is a good reason to be stressed out. Another reason is that I cannot get to my heart. There’s no hinge on the ribcage that I could bend so I could look in, see it, and feel flooded with relief, thinking: oh good, there it goes. It’s inaccessible. That’s not a good reason to be stressed, not being able to get at your own insides.
We have no dogs in Brooklyn. There are a lot of sirens popping up, like the cortisol response to something else going on, the lights too red like faux cherries. But we’ve been by a hospital for longer than there’s been a pandemic so a lot of sirens at once is also not deeply abnormal. I try to be reasonable about the mail, the air, our clothes, how long people that aren’t me wash their hands. I try not to hold knives about it. I try not to point in at my body, either, to say, what if here? I do think I have a cavity. I did go into Manhattan to hear a dentist point at that spot and say, “no, not there.” Is it funny I could die because I get so convinced of my dying? It has to be a little funny, me in the subway, molars intact in the dawning April of 2020, thinking wrong.
In Ohio, there’s this water tower where turkey vultures perch and I like to see them teetering at the domed top of the powder-blue tower. I like to think they’re talking. The dogs would bark at them when I’d walk them by, but the birds, too high and beyond and up that no one could say honey to them, didn’t move. Yes, I think I’m sick all the time and yes I’m not sick yet and I might not get that way. I think about water in my lungs and water in my brain and water, hanging in the air like so much waiting, in a summer that I am not in anymore. I cannot get back to see it, I just have to know that it’s still working.
I am in my own dog-less place and a huge terrible thing has teeth around the days. Most of my work has been cut. I’m grateful to have kept some. Sometimes, I’m furious at what’s around, and devastated, and I get to eating saltines and cadbury eggs and pacing and checking my not-cavity in the mirror to see if it has a gun that it’s hoisting between shaky uphills on its bike, the bike that it has, the cavity. Ohio is so empty in a lot of spots. It’s got such relief in it. It’s still good to me, the preserved bits I can unpack and chew through again. Some of it sits inside the alternations of absolute terror and absolute boredom, this being sure there’s a murderer on an empty walk home where you’re a 4’11’’ queer woman and what’s around you is rural and you are too afraid, almost always.
It is not new for me to think I am ending or could be easily and soon. Slipping into this belief again, now, when more people are having it and for better reasons than I usually have, I’ve got a weird calm around me. I’ve been on this walk before. It does not erase the fear or nullify its reality. It just gives me its dogs, a water tower, streaks of someone I loved climbing a trellis when it was dumb to climb a trellis. I open these things when I start thinking too sharply. I pour them out and remember the humidity. This isn’t fixing and this isn’t not dying. This is a preserved meanwhile, shelf-stable and little and inconsequential and I need it to be that way. We put our homemade masks on to go to the grocery store. I floss too much. I wait three days to open my new mail. This is barking at vultures on their sky-colored near-heaven, I know that. They will not hear and they will not move and they will not care. I manage to do it anyway. I think of my loved ones’ hands under hot water in the sink, reddening like hearts I can’t reach. They are managing to go on anyway. This isn’t fixing and this isn’t not dying. It’s the containment I can manage from here, the decision, with exhaustion, that I can be working for myself in the dark and not against.
Basilique Saint Nicolas by Betsy Neis
Photography
List of Reasons by Jaclyn Griffith
The gravity of coronavirus became clear to me in early March, during my spring break, when I spent 10-hour days writing my master’s thesis in the eerily quiet lobby of a pharmacy building on campus. The situation felt catastrophic but still distant at that time, the way a horror movie plays in your mind after you watch it—terrifying, but you remind yourself it’s only fiction. I paced around the tile floor while on the phone with my mother, speculating about what would come next and how we would handle it. I was dreading social distancing, but I was grateful to have an apartment I loved, work that could be done at home for at least a few weeks, and a list of other privileges. I told my mom that of all the times in my life for the world to seemingly come to a halt, this was a convenient one for me, since I had no travel plans and a thesis to stay inside and write, anyway. I was uncharacteristically level-headed, rational, even optimistic—and I was shocked by my own disposition. My mom noticed my demeanor and let out her signature laugh—loud and sharp—before telling me, You would be a freakin’ MESS right now if you weren’t medicated.
I started seeing a therapist in the spring of 2018, the year after I graduated from college in New York and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. The day we met, I told my therapist that I had struggled with anxiety on and off throughout my life. She asked me questions about what my anxiety looks and feels like. I answered her as honestly as I could, but I withheld some information that I wouldn’t reveal until months later when I trusted her fully. I admitted to her that my anxiety became overwhelming when I was in eighth grade, but really, I think it started long before that. As a kid, I remember rolling up my baby blanket and shoving it under my shirt whenever I felt sad and didn’t know why. I swore the softness on my stomach made me feel better.
For the last two years, I’ve spent nearly every Friday afternoon in my therapist’s office in Wayland Square, picking at my nail polish as we talk about mindfulness, grounding exercises, and actively halting unproductive thoughts and worries. When I think about potentially moving away after I graduate this semester, leaving my therapist is one of the first losses that comes to mind. It is simple to say that going to therapy has changed my life for the better. I do not want to use abstract language to describe something that has been so concretely beneficial to me and my relationships. This is why I grew frustrated in December of 2019, when I felt I had learned so much from therapy but was still waking up with a sadness on my shoulders, feeling heavy and not knowing why. It was a familiar sadness, one that had come and gone unpredictably throughout my life. My sadness was distinct from my anxiety, which I had under control, thanks to my therapist. Anxiety takes root in my head, then spreads to my body, but my sadness does the opposite.
I started searching for ways to explain it away, listing reasons why I might be depressed. Temporarily, this list made me feel better, liberating me from the fear that I might be “the crazy girl.” It’s just the circumstances, I told myself each time the sadness creeped back. It won’t be like this forever. But there will always be The List of Reasons. If you look hard enough, you can always identify reasons to be sad, and I was searching for these reasons not because I was incapable of seeing the good in my life, but because I was already feeling sad, and I was desperate to make sense of why. But a chemical imbalance doesn’t follow logic. You can’t talk yourself out of a mental illness. And I got sick of making lists, even when they were full of legitimate reasons. This time, I listed my measly grad student stipend, and the knowledge that I’m unwillingly growing apart from my best college friends, and every headline since the 2016 presidential election. But these reasons are not flaws in my life, nor are they problems to be solved. They will change, and perhaps some of them will be resolved, but they will always be replaced with new reasons to be sad. They will inevitably become a measly starting salary, and the knowledge that my parents are growing old, and the way violence against women never seems to leave the patriarchy’s zeitgeist, or some other equivalents. Perhaps the most obvious reason of all to be depressed is a global pandemic that isolates you from your loved ones and kills thousands.
In January, after crying through most of my Christmas break, I told my mom I was considering starting an antidepressant. She told me that she had been taking one for about a decade, and that before she started it, her sadness looked a lot like mine. I’ve been wanting to suggest this to you for years, she revealed, but I was afraid I’d hurt your feelings if you weren’t ready to hear it yet. Although I no longer felt shame and stigma about taking medication like I did as a teenager, I continued to oscillate, not convinced that my sadness was anything more than a normal part of my personality. There had been times when I was truly happy for several months at a time, even when my life wasn’t perfect. With the exception of a few particularly dark seasons, I wasn’t incapable of feeling joy. I wasn’t a social recluse. No one could see my sadness unless they knew me very well. I had never planned or attempted suicide, and I worried that saying I had depression would undermine those who were suffering more than I was.
Luckily, I had the support of my therapist, who patiently reminded me that although my suffering may not have been as bad as other people’s, I still deserved to take an antidepressant if it would help me feel better. She can’t prescribe medicine, but she diagnosed me with dysthymia, which now falls under persistent depressive disorder in the DSM-V. Dysthymia, which I had never heard of, is different than major depressive disorder (some refer to dysthymia as minor depressive disorder). It typically develops during adolescence, and it comes and goes throughout a person’s life, making it difficult to diagnose. It may be subtle, but it is distinct from healthy, everyday sadness. It is genetic. And it often goes undiagnosed because people think the sadness is just part of your personality.
I started taking an antidepressant by the end of the month, after seeing a psychiatrist who wrote me a prescription for Sertraline, the generic version of Zoloft. My psychiatrist is a bold, abrasive woman with a painting on the wall of her office that reads, Choose Happiness. A strange choice of decor, I think, for a doctor who treats mental illnesses. I don’t particularly like her, mostly because during my first visit, she asked me if I realized how attractive I am, then suggested I have some perspective about the problems in my life. Apparently, if you’re pretty, you should look in the mirror each time your depression flares up. Once a month, I hand her a $25 copay for a 10-minute appointment and pick up my prescription an hour later.
Contrary to the anecdotal evidence given to me (and I’m sure many others) throughout my life, my depression could not be completely cured by positive thinking or the decision to Choose Happiness. I was already able to recognize the good in my life, to lean into fleeting moments of euphoria. I embraced small and grand moments of joy, like dancing to Paramore with my best friend in her parents’ kitchen, or reading Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People in a café with my headphones in, or driving to work in the morning when the sun was strong and my lipstick was red and the Starbucks barista had found the perfect ratio between black tea and lemonade for my iced drink. But fear of my next downswing paralyzed me into indecision. I was terrified of making the one wrong choice that would bring me back to the sadness I had faced so many other times in my life. I blamed myself—harshly—for each relapse. Like during my junior year of college, when I was studying abroad in Italy, and I sat on the steps in Piazza di Santa Maria Novella and let out ugly, unromantic sobs until a kind stranger handed me a pile of tissues from her coat pocket. I cried to my mom on a $32 phone call home that day, telling her, I don’t understand why it’s so hard for me to be happy, wiping my face with the stranger’s tissues, bunched up into a ball. I’m supposed to be having the time of my life. Or during my first semester of college, when I was utterly unable to fall asleep before sunrise, then fell asleep in all of my classes. (I wish someone had checked on me that year.) Or this past summer, when I worked double shifts in a restaurant and woke up feeling nauseous more days than not. Or the summer before my senior year of college, when I had a panic attack every time I stepped foot in a department store. Or my first semester of graduate school, when I got dumped by a dude I went on only one date with, then my sadness spent six months with me, and I kept making that list in my head, trying to make sense of what was wrong with me and how I could feel so heartbroken over someone I barely knew. Even on my best days, I was walking on eggshells of my own emotions, remembering all the times they’d cracked beneath my feet.
The first morning after starting the prescription, I woke up with a thick headache that lasted four days. I was fatigued enough to fall asleep in the Boston Public Library in the middle of the afternoon, with my arms and head resting on the keyboard of my laptop and my thesis draft open in front of me, begging me to wake up and write. I felt like an infant learning how to keep my head up for the first time. Luckily, the side effects faded within a week, and I started to feel the benefits of the medication around the tenth day. I am extremely lucky not to have suffered from more side effects and to have found the right pill on my first try. This is rare, and it is largely because of genetics; if a prescription works for your parent, it is more likely to work for you. (Thanks, mom.) I am also extremely lucky to have health insurance, and I will never stop fighting for an American healthcare system that doesn’t tie insurance to employment.
I maintained my reservations about whether or not the Sertraline was working for another two months, even after I’d upped my dosage. I’d had good months before, when my sadness had softened, so I thought I might just be experiencing another upswing. I questioned if I was just experiencing a placebo effect. I thought I might just be in a good mood because my thesis was coming along nicely and my boyfriend told me he loved me for the first time. As I said, there will always be The List of Reasons if you search hard enough for them.
But then I hear my mom’s laugh, and, you would be a freakin’ MESS if you weren’t medicated,and I stop pacing. My mom is right. I am extremely grateful that I started taking an antidepressant before the pandemic began to wreak havoc on us. I do not mean to suggest that anyone who is anxious or depressed during this pandemic needs to be medicated. The reasons to be depressed right now are abundant (as are the reasons to start working with a therapist, which I do recommend to nearly everyone). Rather, I am relating my sadness to the pandemic to demonstrate the disconnect that existed between my depression and my experiences. Before starting medication, my sadness was dysphoric, and it was not really caused by the list of reasons I told myself it was. It didn’t follow any logic, as proven now by the fact that we are in the middle of a global pandemic yet I am doing okay. Coronavirus has put my past sadness into perspective, demonstrating to me that my downswings were never my fault after all.
I am not doing well through this, of course, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who is. I have returned to grinding my teeth at night for the first time in months, and I often wake up feeling empty and hopeless again. I am mourning the lives of strangers and of people I know. I am worried about money. There are (many) days when I watch 8 hours of reality TV and eat a family-size bag of peanut M&Ms and don’t brush my teeth because everything feels pointless. I am deeply angry and disappointed, though not surprised, by the actions and rhetoric of our president. There are days when my skills from therapy make me wildly glad to have done work in advance to prepare for situations that test your resilience and your ability to care for your own mental health. And then there are days when I don’t even bother trying to implement them. I miss hugging my mom, and reading in cafés, and spilling secrets over margaritas with my friends, and the two tiny freckles on my boyfriend’s left hand. I am grieving the time I can no longer spend with the people I love—the intangible yet universal loss we are all suffering right now. Coronavirus violently demonstrates how important it is to hold your loved ones close while making it impossible to do so. I am sad every day, but I am not depressed. And one by one, the eggshells beneath my feet have begun to disappear.
Rue Premion by Betsy Neis
Photography
holding by rachel dean
Before this collective loneliness, I was lonely. I ate dinner standing up, my food cold, and called my mother so I could hear my own name being spoken aloud. Now voices come from the television, from the men on the news who like to gesticulate. There are no real answers in their pandemic-speeches, just illusions made grandiose by emphasis and syntax. Invisible enemy, they like to say. Frontlines. War. Even the English language is patriarchal—centered as it is on patterns of combativeness and control. And yes, I’ll say it, these podium-men are perfectly made for spaghetti westerns, and sometimes I imagine them in cowboy hats, lassos at their belts, faces creased with small-town dirt. In the end of these movies many of the characters end up dead, but that’s because they either deserved it or didn’t, and I’ve never been good at telling the difference.
In any case, I’ve always thought that all death is sad—for the innocent or the guilty. This sensitivity is further provoked during a pandemic, when every day feels like a settlement with grief—no, I don’t have control, no, no one else does, yes, an end exists for everyone. And mortality is crippling—I tend to realize it while driving, always as if for the first time, that I’m going to die eventually. Do other people think this way, or think about it as often as I do? I’ve always been afraid to ask my friends: Do you think about the end of your life? Do you sometimes believe that the person you love most in the world will have to be, of course, the first person on earth who will never die? But these are not questions you ask over drinks. Maybe they are not questions you ask at all.
In this time of social distancing, in lieu of attending church, my Catholic mother has asked me to watch Mass from home on Facebook. Each Sunday, our priest live-streams himself for those able to tune-in remotely. In one homily, he says that the pandemic reminds us that we have little control over our own lives, that this is an abject sign that humans must surrender to God and his benevolent will. But this still seems like a lukewarm answer. I only want—like all people—to be told that everything will be okay. But surely the people I love will be safe, I whisper each night before bed. Surely no one I love will die. This is not prayer, I don’t pray, but it is a kind of wagering with the universe—and isn’t that belief of a more reasonable kind?
It’s strange to me that priests don’t speak more frankly about death, that they haven’t invented a more reliable method of confronting it. Any discussion of mortality is always centered on the promise of the afterlife, which seems—at least to me—a lousy reckoning system. I would like them to address it more concretely, to appeal to the realists—truly, what do you suggest I do with my paralyzing fear of death, Father?
In his collection In the Western Night, Frank Bidart writes, “Our not-love is like a man running down / a mountain, who, if he dares to try to stop, / falls over— / my hands wanted to touch your hands / because we had hands”. This seems to be real, yes, that even not-love can be rapturous and worthy, that in these times, the idea of touching—in greeting, with casualness—has been reordered as intimate. I think of all I will reach for when this is over, an innumerable list made more urgent by love. I would like to touch faces, jaws, mouths; I would like to sit close to the people I love and tell them that I love them, over and over again, until the words fall loose from their meaning.
And maybe it’s pedantic to write an essay about a pandemic and then return to the salvation of love, as if this will fix the people who have lost love, who have been lost, who do not have the privilege of reflecting as I do. It won’t fix anything. Of course I know this. But from my vantage point, limited as it is, this seems like the only true thing worth saying: that a cynic, forever objecting to love and its ornaments, has surrendered to it completely. And maybe I am reducing myself further by believing that I will be the kind of person who emerges from her distancing a metamorphosed woman. Will I really reach out, after all this, and speak truly? Will I not hold back, will I be a braver person?
What exists beyond this present is only speculation, so I attempt to take these isolated moments for what they are. And to this end I will admit the obvious: for all my heightened senses and new vulnerabilities, I have also been exhausted by grief, I am mourning what we have lost to the greed of our elected officials, I am sad that I have to create from this experience a narrative that feels stomachable. My anxiety somersaults when I go to the supermarket for groceries, when I talk to my grandmothers on the phone. I cry in my bed, beneath the layered covers, like I used to when I was a child. There is no neat value to be deduced from a pandemic with a massive death toll, or from any event; I’ll resist that now and probably forever. But working through something on the page is an act of confrontation; it requires an individual and specific courage, and in this new era I am working toward that—that I will say what I mean, that I will follow my words with action, that I will understand it’s possible to hold joy and grief together, at once, in the same broken heart.