Last night, I attended our Mentor Series wrap-up gathering at Hidden Falls Regional Park on the banks of the Mississippi, in St. Paul. Like everything in the world today, though the setting looked familiar, it was an unsettling, aberrant affair. No potluck dishes to share, masks hid faces and muffled voices (it was a surreal Kubrick endeavor, trying to find my group in an expansive park where nearly every group was wearing masks), wide expanses separated bodies, a twisted mirage of realities converging in one space, I had a hard time separating what was real and what was not.  

Just beyond the space where our cohort was spread out on the grass, about five lifetimes ago, my husband and I wandered down to the river, in wedding attire, to take our own wedding photos. It was a week after the actual service, we were so young, had so little money, our belongings a cobbled together collection of hand-me-downs, thrift store finds, tender new careers, unreliable cars. I was almost rabidly insistent on not falling into the financial trappings so typical of weddings—our love was more valuable than a superficial performance, I proclaimed. A dear friend made my dress in exchange for hair services (many, many hair services; 25 years later, I must still owe her more haircuts and spiral perms, with accumulating interest, for that stunning labor of love), the last stitch completed and the dress handed over the day before the wedding, to the horror of my mom, Bob’s mom, many aunts, and several friends, all of whom had been offering their old wedding dresses as my plan B. I wasn’t worried. I knew my friend well. The insanely gifted, self-proclaimed poster woman for women with acute ADHD would come through, I knew it. And she did. At the 11th hour, flying in all frazzled and wild-eyed, like Kramer on Seinfeld, fueled entirely on Marlboros and caffeine, with a dress that dazzled even the dry cleaners who had to pressed it for me, because Cate didn’t have time—she was racing out of town to be at the side of her dying grandmother.

What had started out as a simple sheath dress morphed into a breathtaking artifact, imagined on the fly, without a pattern, after a Valentino design we’d torn out of a fashion magazine and taped to the wall of her basement studio, for inspiration. Encrusted with glass beads and intricate lace that Cate had antiqued in a tea bath to add vintage esthetic, draped in raw silk, cleverly topped with a 1940s bustiere, camouflaged by more beads and lace and somehow attached to a hidden body suit that kept the whole damned, glorious enterprise together, which also made going to the bathroom a tricky endeavor. The bustier had belonged to Cate’s very busty grandmother, who’d taught Cate to sew, to whom my dress became a living tribute, because she was actively dying while Cate was furiously sewing, which had to be severely modified to fit my not-so-busty bust, but the thick, stiff layer of beads and lace gave the illusion otherwise. Bob’s mom was horrified, after hearing about my dress, that her son was going to show up in his best Dockers and a button-down shirt and one of four ties in his possession—the only formal-ish formal wear he owned. His parents rushed up and whisked him off to somewhere—maybe the Men’s Warehouse—to be hastily fitted for a suit worthy enough to accompany my wearable textile sculpture.

I refused to wear a veil, I wrapped stems of dried flower bouquets with long satin ribbon (hey, it was the mid-90s), told my bridesmaids to find a dress they loved in the color of wine. I designed our wedding invitations on an old MacIntosh (which wasn’t old at the time), and adamantly refused to hire a professional photographer. I hate being the center of attention and a traditional wedding photographer would have demanded this ridiculous performance of me. Besides, Bob was a photographer—why buy the cow when I can get the milk for free, right, Dad? wink-wink…the wedding night ended in a fury of thunder, lightening and high winds, tornado sirens tearing up the night skies around the metro area, and if one were superstitious and believed in signs from the universe, that storm could absolutely have been read as a heralding one.

It was an odd night to be out taking wedding photos, twenty five years ago, I remember that. There we were, on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening, traipsing around with me in obvious wedding clothes, Bob in a somber suit, photography equipment slung over his shoulder. Surely it must have looked strange at times, like perhaps I was a jilted lover abandoned at the alter, draped in mourning clothes meant for a celebration, that I’d hired my own photographer to document my dramatic fall, propped up against trees, laying out on the grass, the river as a backdrop. Still, people strolling by melted into smiles when they saw us, boaters floating by waved wildly, their shouts of good wishes carried across the water and up the river banks to us. Even with the absence of facts, others knew what was what.

If you had told that young woman version of me, standing against a tree in that more-art-piece-than-dress, how life was going to turn out, twenty five years down the river, she might have dropped dead from shock right there on the banks of the Mississippi. At the very least, run screaming in the other direction to try escape this fate, maybe she would have scrambled to try to change some of the endings for some of the chapters…last night, all of these thoughts were more liquid in form, this morning solidifying with my morning coffee and a cool, after-storm breeze…I’m just letting them roll like a river, see where they take me…

It was an odd night last night, our end-of-the-year Mentor Series gathering. Everything, on the surface looked just like our old world did, but the pandemic has stirred everything under the surface up, nothing is what it seems, no one knows what’s what anymore, but we keep applying old world rules to this strange new world, and we keep coming up with incongruence, false truths, incoherent storylines, as though if we keep trying, something will finally, suddenly make sense.

Straining to hear others talk across the spaces, I finally gave up on the group conversation and settled into a one-to-one with the poet sitting next to, but not-very near me, who had hosted our last in-person potluck before the pandemic mangled everything near and dear to us into a distorted, incomprehensible mess, who had read with me at the Mentor Series’ first strange, virtual reading a month or so ago…we shared battle-weary stories of how we’re getting by in our respective, myopic, isolated lives. She talked about the ache of not being able to hold a brother’s new baby, of missing the children who used to come to the summer programs at the library where she now works remotely. She spoke wistfully of the beloved dog who belongs to her partner’s parents, who whines plaintively at the window when he sees her in the yard when they stop by for visit, but isn’t allowed out because of the fear that even a family pet could transmit the deadly virus. Can there be more disorienting, damaging place to live, than in a world where willful separation is an act of love and mercy, and physical closeness is not just selfish but a potentially deadly act? Who can even begin to make sense of this, much less be okay in it?

My sisters made a surprise visit last night, arriving just before I was to head to the Mentor Series gathering, bearing pickles from the farmer’s market and a fresh supply of poop bags for Rocco (it’s the little things in life these days, right?). I invited them to join me, as it’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen them with my own eyes, and I didn’t want to short-change our real-life connection. They were in town because Jill’s daughter had been invited to a social-distance birthday party of a friend from their old life in Golden Valley; Gretchen decided to tag along with them, and take a chance that I was free for an unplanned visit (which is usually a safe guess in my severely restricted world of the past five months).

Jill lamented the agony of deciding whether to send her kids back to school, fraught with logistic snafus and very real, inherent risks in the fall, or continuing their near-impossibly stressful but much-safer home learning environment; as of last night, their warped version of sheltering in place has won out. Gretchen struggles with the dichotomy of being gratefully employed in an environment that is in the heart of the viral beast, with Mayo Healthcare Services in Mankato, but like anyone, lives in fear of losing her job to the impetuous whims of a lethal virus…at the end of our visit, yearning for a real hug, and because I’ve also lost a chunk of my mind, I took the blanket that we had been sitting on at the park, draped it over myself and clasped each of my sisters in a covid-appropriate embrace, which was captured on camera and if this doesn’t look like yet another strange Kubrick moment come to life, especially with Gretchen in her corgi face mask, I don’t know what does.

As each month slogs on, it’s getting harder to write about this experience that doesn’t end, with unfathomable consequences that keep rolling out in unforeseeable unforgiving ways, but writing is the only thing I have helping me through a time where I have a hard time writing about what isolation means in my isolated language, from my isolated perspective. When I begin to lament, I immediately bump up against others’ realities, and it all feels so absurd and pointless…speaking of which, I just finished Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and now I’m an absurdist, as Camus was. Everything is absurd, nothing matters, what’s the point of anything can be our battle cry in this pandemic world. And with it, one can either decide, well, nothing really matters, what’s the point of anything—we might as well die? Or we can say, nothing really matters, what’s the point of anything—then we might as well not let the absurd get in the way of life, love, compassion, doing the right thing, and making good trouble…yes, a respectful nod to the wise, late John Lewis, because nothing is random…

But, what else can I do but use this time to knit together string of events of past and present lives, and this thing I’m knitting is billowing out of control, and now feels now more like an affliction than affection…I’ve had images of fire and destruction coursing though my mind, song lyrics of necessary destruction, ideas of complete collapse, which make me ponder the etymology of apocalypse which is not an end but truly an uncovering, time to make a few small repairs, if you will.

The current world events raging across the globe in a breathtaking all-encompassing manner that we can hardly keep up with, are revealing so much that is wrong with our world in horribly painful ways—we simply can’t continue to brutalize our planet and its inhabitants as we have been, we simply can’t…and the fiery imagery that i’ve been obsessed with lately slowly eased into the softer idea of a caterpillar-to-butterfly, which pissed me off immensely, like I’d suddenly given up—we need fire and brimstone in an apocalypse, not flowers and butterflies, dammit!!! 

To deferred to a lame-ass cliché of a metaphor to describe this epic, indescribable, apocalyptic, catastrophic epoch? You’re growing soft in isolation, Jen….so, of course, I began a little armchair research on the process of biological metamorphosis, which began with the question that is often skipped over, “do caterpillars feel pain when they turn to butterflies?” which lead my down an entomological rabbit hole (can I use two different species to describe this process? You bet, I can. We are living in a lawless land, which is not a terrible thing, I assure you. Everygoddamed thing needs to be dismantled and defunded. We need to start everything back at the beginning. Everything. Back. Beginning.).

Which made me realize how careless we are with metaphors, when we don’t know their origin or their full truth, when we use them as a casual shorthand for a monumental, holy thing, an easy way around something that demands deeper interrogation. We miss their larger purpose, as real, profound tools of navigation in unsettling times, harbingers of past lives that help us move forward in a disorienting landscape, like the stars and the lunar pull,,, when used in this more complex way, metaphors’ messages won’t give you the answers you want, all neat and tidy, predicable and easy. Instead, they’ll take you down the dark and rambling path which won’t be pleasant, aand you will fall too many times to count, and when it’s finally over (spoiler alert, it’s never over) you’ll probably be a little uglier for the efforts, by conventional standards, anyway. Take comfort knowing that your smile will be more visible and welcomed with wrinkles no longer masked by derivatives of botulism, your wild hair will be out you as a comrade for truth and justice, your lost job a worthy sacrifice…rewrite the rules.

What if I told you that that metamorphosis isn’t a choice in the matter, the way we propagandize and bastardize the process, but is, instead a primordial duty to you shed your own skin and make yourself raw, four times, then wrap yourself in a fifth and final version

and inside this crystal bag of yourself, you will dissolve your own muscles in a bath of caustic enzymes, leaving only your breathing apparatus, maybe your heart and a fistful of residual cells carried from the pockets of your old clothes into this new mourning cloak

the imaginal discs that lay dormant in the gooey mess that used to be you, have been patiently waiting for this necessary destruction, this transformative moment to turn your sticky, broken down mess into something more solid, still trembling and raw, with the strength to split the old old version of you down the middle

you are your own escape hatch 

you slide out of yourself, a stream of your own waste pouring out behind your like the tail of a comet igniting the earth

Just before my sisters showed up, I received a seemingly random, completely unexpected text message from a woman I don’t know very well and haven’t talked to in literally years: “Hi. i have been so inspired by your FB posts. Your AFAF (alcohol free as f*ck) posts have hit me in the heart. This week, I joined Annie’s program…thank you for your honesty and your amazing writing. Love across the miles.” I was equal parts shocked and deeply moved. Being alcohol free in a pandemic has felt like the only super power I have in a time where we’ve been stripped of everything we once knew, but it also feels kind of useless…I mean, who cares, anyway? Does it really even matter, when we’re all hurtling toward a most certain death, at the very least, massive destruction, anyway? There’s very little I’m sure of any more, but in spite of that very real truth, that nothing has ever been certain—we’re fooling ourselves in a terrible way if we think otherwise, and still, I want to watch it all burn with a clear mind and eyes, and heart.

We exchanged a few more messages until my sisters showed up, until I started treading dangerously into a nutzo-buttzo religious zealot territory (kinda like I am now). For those few moments, via a few random text messages—my absolute least favorite form of communication— of all places, I felt a sense of connection and peace, that settled my racing heart. Every now and then, in this distorted new landscape, I find evidence of this truth, that things still really matter, we just now have to work harder and do things differently than we did before…of course, we already know that nothing is random, right? Sometimes that’s easy to forget, especially in these severely disconnected times that are forcing all of us to seek connections in strange and wondrous and sometimes inconvenient, infuriating ways—hell, my sister’s been worshipping at the church of TikTok these days…we will find our sources where we can, or they will find us.

And that, dear teacher, is what I’ve done on my summer vacation. Now, I’m tired and need a nap. xo