I Don’t Want to Be Here Now and You Can’t Make Me - The New York Times

COBH, Ireland — I’m a brown-haired woman and I usually feel fine about it. But in rocky times, existential or personal, my hair is the first problem on my list. The drumbeat starts, and I can’t ignore it. Change your hair, change your hair. I will. As soon as everything goes back to normal and I get home to Brooklyn, I know a Russian lady who will dye my hair a warm red-brown color.

I feel better once that’s decided, and so I start to look for examples to show her. I deleted Instagram, my usual source of hair inspiration, because it was making my mind entirely too jumpy and hateful. Now that I’m back in rural Ireland, TV with my parents has become my only medium. I look out for just the right hair color there. I’m wedged between them on a two-person sofa eating shepherd’s pie when I finally spot the color I want, on a commercial about why speeding is dangerous. I jump up to take a photo of the weeping woman on the large flat screen, explaining to my parents, “That’s quite like the hair I want, just a little deeper, more like, rustier.”

They exchange a glance and I understand that this situation is not one they planned for. They are kind, hard-working people who raised eight children and sent us off into the world, only for the strangest one to come back through their door at the first sign of danger.

I fled New York in the middle of March, scared I’d be caught in the coronavirus epicenter with no way back to Ireland. After two weeks in quarantine, I showed up at my parents’ house and I’m here now for the foreseeable future, drinking their coffee and upsetting their precious new baby, a cranky rag doll cat called Leo who glares at me with glacial eyes.

I understand I’m extremely lucky. People are dying; terror is everywhere; my generation is being asked to do things we never imagined. And I don’t mean Jared Kushner. As for me, my life is back where it started and on hold indefinitely.

What is to be done? Messages filter through the ether. It’s an interesting time. A reset. A time to take stock. No, thanks! I’d managed to set up my life in a way that I never have to take stock. My identity had become where I lived, what I did and who my friends were. I want to be able to realize and regret that later, not when it’s still so much fun. What’s called for is a meditative calm, to understand what we can and can’t control, the ultimate “be here now” moment. Well, how about this, Ram Dass? I don’t want to be here now, and you can’t make me.

At first, I decide to use this time to get fitter, stronger, to become not only impervious to illness, but something close to invincible. I hate running, but I downloaded an app to get me going. Running for 90 seconds at a time is perfectly manageable until I fall over during the walking part. This is not the cute, slapstick-style tumble of a girl in a romantic comedy. This is a full, heavy thump that smashes my phone and busts my knee open, accompanied by an old man’s wheezing shout. I pick myself up and look around for the old man who made that terrible sound. That old man … is me.

I limp home wondering what will happen to my dating life. I see the outline of what looks like a man in the distance and squint hopefully. He is eclipsed by the manure storage tank and as he emerges into the light, I see that he is my uncle. Not only related to me by blood, but happily married. I swear to myself by this time next year I’ll have a boyfriend. In fact, I decide, I’ll have a boyfriend and a husband. Yes, an adulterous married woman with deep-red hair and the scars of an athlete, that’s who will emerge from this pandemic.

Ten days in and it’s a Saturday afternoon. My father has built a beehive and harvested a huge crop of young spinach, and my mother has made a dozen pots of marmalade and sewed an actual quilt. I’ve never felt so useless in my life, and that’s saying a lot. Ideally, I would slump on the armchair in the kitchen and think sadly for a while, but Leo is sprawled across my favorite moping chair, pretending to be asleep. I blow on him and he tries to bite me, and then my mother tells me to leave him alone.

My father dons his white plastic overalls and searches through the shed for something I can use as a desk. I’m grateful, but the scene reminds me of the men setting up temporary morgues in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I watch from thousands of miles away as the humanity comes shining out through the horror enveloping my city. I talk to my friends there as sirens wax and wane in the background and I feel an absentee’s guilt for leaving.

My heart is there, my body is here, and my head is nowhere to be found. I sit at my janky new desk, trying to remember how to write. Then on Sunday the clocks change, putting me one more hour away from New York and creating just what we need here: a longer day. I mentally annihilate the very construct of time. Then my period arrives two weeks early. The internet tells me stress can do that. It’s surely the stress of competing with a beautiful, angry cat, but at least it means I’m not pregnant.

My friend Shonali and I congratulate ourselves on not being parents. I ask her if it’s mean to celebrate that when most of our friends are struggling with bored toddlers, and she assures me it’s not: “I wake up every morning and am grateful for two things I don’t have: a fever and a kid.” I miss my funny and sharp New York City community.

I make tea and settle in for a couple of hours of staring balefully out the window. An ivory floof flashes past. Leo has escaped. He’s an indoor cat, but I’ve left a window open. I know in my bones that if he vanishes I will too, and the only sign I was back here will be an especially luscious raised bed of tulips in the summer.

I watch aghast as he wanders around the garden, swaying his luxurious rump. I race outside and he darts under a trailer. I kneel on the ground and feel my split knee come open again. I curse with the pain, alerting Leo to my presence. I catch him and he manages to bite me. Now my leg and my hand are bleeding. I feel very alive, very present, victorious almost. Depositing him back into the kitchen without my parents even noticing he was gone, I think that perhaps I can handle this after all.

Maeve Higgins (@maevehiggins) is a co-host of the climate justice podcast series “Mothers of Invention” and a contributing Opinion writer.

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I Don’t Want to Be Here Now and You Can’t Make Me - The New York Times
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