We Can Have Our Simple

My alarm goes off at 6:30am every day, assuming I haven’t already woken up to the sunrise that invades my floor-to-ceiling windows, or if my dog hasn’t robbed me of my last thirty minutes of sweet sleep with his neediness. I’m in the club of people who start their day with a truly horrible habit- the morning doom scroll. I catch up on anything I missed between 11pm and 6am and swipe over to my memories to see what my world looked like last year and where I was in that season. The pros and cons about having a near-perfect memory is that I can tell you exactly what happened before and after each photo I’ve ever taken. On this day last year, for example, I walked from Williamsburg, past Long Island City and over the bridge to Central Park. The usual Bethesda Terrace mandolin player was wearing a face mask, playing a John Legend song, and I was watching the turtles move around the lake, taking notes on how to slow down. I shared a photo of the boathouse reflection and got a text from a friend I hadn’t seen in months. “Wait, stay there, I’m here too! I’m coming to find you!” We hadn’t seen each other in too long. We exchanged obligatory disclaimers about when we had our last Covid test and then hugged so tight. We sat in the park with a baguette, cheese and wine from the market. The goodie-goodie in me felt nervous about the open bottle of wine in broad daylight but there was no one to stop us and that teeny tiny rule-breaker-high was a much needed distraction from isolation. I remember all of that just from looking at that photo of the boathouse. I can write a mental list of every other personal-growth girl scout badge I’ve earned since that day, surviving with a chance of thriving. 

I’ve been feeling this inconvenient sadness for the last few weeks. If you’re not feeling it too, kudos to you. But I felt like I needed to write about this longing I’m feeling for 2020. It would be insensitive to say I’m mourning Covid for obvious reasons. Of course, I don’t miss a time when the world was dying by the thousands and we had no idea when it would all get better. Shit, it’s still not better. But I miss running into a friend in Central Park and sharing a bottle of wine- a friend who’s otherwise too busy for planning, but the inconvenience of a global pandemic forced us to both pause our hustle long enough to wind up in the same place at the same time with all the time in the world.

We all had such high hopes for 2020 and instead, it was a forcing function for arranging my priorities. I appreciated the flow of my days- wake up, walk the dog, start drinking by noon, see the same friends, rely on everyone being free all the time for a game night or long walk. The neurotic planner in me learned spontaneity (okay, maybe spontaneity-lite, I’m still neurotic when it comes to planning). 

OH, and dating during a global pandemic was surprisingly fantastic. If you hooked one, there was no wondering, “is he seeing other people '' or “what is he up to” because options were Netflix and takeout alone or Netflx and takeout for two. It was too risky to keep a rotating roster. My confidence during 2020 was at a peak high- you can date around and risk getting severe Covid or you can be happily stuck with me, getting force-fed banana bread. Once I added a puppy to that mix, I was an especially hot commodity. 

It’s wild to think about how desperately I missed the city buzz and now I miss the calm- I would have sawed off a limb to eat indoors, or stand on a crowded rooftop, covered in collective sweat, complaining about overpriced cocktails. This year, I just miss simple. The pandemic taught me I’m more extroverted than I ever knew I was, there’s no way I can chalk these feelings up to social anxiety. New York is near-electric again. We’re almost back to a place where we can get gussied up, take multiple cab rides in one night, take a nap on a disgusting sidewalk to get a second wind, eat questionable street meat, maybe makeout with a stranger if the moment lines up just right- I’m here for all of that.

My beloved pandemic pod is now fully vaccinated, taking trips to Mexico and booking out social calendars weeks in advance, pulling me back towards the independence I used to be so proud of. But we were never supposed to stay in our pandemic-adapted routines and this season’s forcing function is for pushing past whatever anxiety I’m feeling about normalcy. At some point, you have to look at your life from the outside, get hyper-critical of what you resist and what you tolerate and start living again, but on your own terms, surrounded by what feels good and people who have the capacity for your sparkly, sometimes-twisted sense of the world. I’m not ready to go back to being over-committed and over-dressed. I don’t even want to wear pants or fancy shoes. I won’t go back to a life that glorifies being busy every night of the week. 

Last year was this beautiful gift of time and I like to think I used it intentionally. I hope I’ll always feel some nostalgia for to-go cocktails and living slow. Now we get to reassess how we want to spend the one currency we don’t get back. 

This isn’t grief for Covid, I’ll call it grief for easy. I’m so grateful for my fling with simplicity, it may never happen again but there may be new seasons and versions of that airy simplicity that don’t require a pandemic in order to shift how I navigate my days. I can give myself whatever closure I need from last summer and promise myself to keep what works. With balance, comes pickiness. A global pandemic restricted daily life and gave me deeper connections. It reminded me to go easy on myself on wobbly, emotional days and refrain from filling my calendar because it feels good to say yes to plans. I finally learned how to put up a goddamn healthy boundary- my therapist would be proud. There’s no reason I can’t have simplicity and ease while I rebuild my already-overwhelming social calendar. And in case you need to hear this, you don’t have to fully return to your old life. Some things can go while the rhythms that feel good can and should stay. Normalize to-go cocktails and give yourself the breaks and grace you allowed yourself during a time when the world stopped. We can move slower through a world that begs us to rush. We can have our simple.