At home and crashing hard. Which is no surprise - almost a month in a foreign country where, among other vividly privileged delights, everyone has healthcare and almost no one dies of COVID. The reassured and sometimes tedious comfort of an imperfect, sure, but definitely wealthy socialist nation, where way fewer people dance on the edge of the knife, the monotony of being provided for. The only time I wore a mask for nearly my entire time abroad was in transit or briefly in line at the very efficient, very convenient, and very free testing sites. I very much lived in a different world, a safer one. And then I got to have my little americano coffee and my little cardamom bun in the morning, I got to ride my bright orange rental bike around in the sea spray, loud seagulls overhead, and then there was that blessed, horribly underused baby grand piano in the museum gift shop. A deep peace in plunking out those chords and being six hours ahead of the American news which had yet to break for the day, from my perspective. It felt like I was out ahead of it, like maybe I had outrun something, and every hour of the day abroad felt like the earliest part of an American morning, when there are fewer vehicles on the street and you might persuade yourself into thinking that it will be a beautiful day. I think that might be called hope in a less bleak moment.

And then of course I did what I always do which is chomp down on too big a bite. I am literally always doing this - I'm the hungriest person you know - but figuratively what I mean is that the long-awaited techno festival miraculously happened this year and instead of going home after my month away I had my friends pick me up at the airport and take me straight there for four straight days of wall-rattling sub bass, overpowered fog machines, camping in the mud, and ambient music wafting through the lasers in the trees. I powered through my jet lag and I drank bottles of carbonated mate and on that first night I was so tired that I was dreaming on the dance floor - I swayed back and forth and closed my eyes and could feel my feet on the blessedly padded floor but instead of bodies writhing in the binary dark of the strobe lights I saw swaying fields of grass, taller than me. What blessings! And there's the inverse, too, because when we finally got home to my sweet little apartment I share with my sweet little partner I closed my eyes in the quiet of our bedroom and all I could see were limbs, elbows, hands gesticulating in the air to the beat. I was talking through my dreams out loud, describing what I saw, but then I hushed up suddenly for fear the dream of dancing bodies would vanish.

And yet that dancing dream is over now. Gone, too, is the feeling of having outrun something. My days this week have felt very profoundly like it has all caught up with me: that black cloud of virus fear, the many and often painful changes in the last year and a half, the friendships that have shriveled up with lack of contact (are you mad at me?), the profound loneliness of the small, hard town we live in now where we still hardly know a soul, my having worked very casually for some time and probably needing more substantial income soon, the just unrelentingly and brutally online nature of so much. It's true that you reap what you sow and the reaping often fucking sucks, but you also only get to reap what survives the things that are out of your control. When there's drought or famine or plague in the air you should allow yourself to be less personally responsible for the consequences, but that part's tricky. I tend to think - bible study influence - that good things happen to good people and that bad things are a consequence of your bad actions. While the real truth is that things bad or good happen with no verifiable reason all the time, and that good works more often than not go unrewarded, and that when you do get ahold of something good you should really just thank your lucky stars for it - the lucky stars probably have more to do with you getting what you want than you working hard at it.

So here I am, floating but not floating away, like a mylar balloon cut loose but not inflated enough to take to the skies. Symptoms of this moment include wondering whether or not I could get something out of religious services held on zoom, googling the closest al-anon meeting in my zip code (Tuesdays, a three mile distance, do I dare ask to use the truck that night?), and signing up for three months of online therapy, then taking it personally that the automated website doesn't match me with a counselor more swiftly (nobody likes me!).

While having a fit about it my partner tells me this cumulative trough is not the hardest thing you have ever lived through, which is hard and good medicine. I flip through the catalog of episodes that felt insurmountable at the time and can't help but notice that I'm here and, behold, they've been surmounted. So the question is: what did I have in my possession then that I don't have now? What equipment did I carry up those unceasingly uphill marches?

The answer, I think, is this: the cohesion of a community, the joyful tangle of dancing bodies, and regularly demonstrating to myself that I was capable, viable, valid. With these surrounding you there is nothing you can't live through - now I just have to get it all back, simply do the work and, while sowing, hope that I get to visit the swaying grass or the mass of groovers in my dreams.