We’ve Got Five Years, My Brain Hurts a Lot

A few mornings ago I heard ambulance sirens all around my apartment. Something bad must have happened. Or maybe we are on the verge of something bad happening.

In spring 2020, after shutdown, the days and nights were full of sirens here, they felt like they lasted for months. Wyckoff Heights, the closest hospital, recorded the first official COVID death. Even if we couldn’t see what was happening, we could hear it. This is the five year anniversary of the pause in New York, and around the United States. Who are we to ignore it?

Maybe I use the word ‘dystopian’ too often. Perhaps there are too many reasons to use the word. Maybe I write about COVID too much. Well, over a million Americans died since 2020, and over 100 million people in this country have had it. The ambulance sirens were the most visceral COVID experience for many that spring. When I’ve spoken to people, those who don’t live in cities, people who might not know they’re using dog whistle racist language like “but you all live on top of each other” and “you’re all crammed together on the trains,” I like to tell them about two things: the goddamn sirens and how New York, in spring 2020, and then Los Angeles in January 2021, both lifted air quality regulations so crematoriums could keep up with processing the dead, from one epicenter to another. Sometimes people need grim facts to shut the fuck up.

I worked at an essential provider, a food pantry and soup kitchen. Over 300 pantries and kitchens closed, which makes sense when you understand that so many of them are in small, crowded spaces where no one could distance, often run by older volunteers. We stayed open the entire time. It wasn’t lost on any of my colleagues that we’d all make more money home on unemployment with the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, but we didn’t have that option.

Those early days were unknown and wild. People came from Staten Island, New Jersey and the Bronx to Bed-Stuy for food. I’ll never forget the blur of donations those first few weeks. There were tons of food from restaurants, some of it really fancy, but also schools and offices. I said yes to everything. A lot of businesses and non-profits across the country donated food to the city, some of the highlights I recall, all pallets mind you, 5 gallon glass jars of kosher pickles, giant plastic jugs of Zatarins New Orleans Blackened Seasoning, graham cracker pie crusts in the shell. Cheez-its, beautiful delicious Cheez-its.

We slowly moved everything so we could make space for food. The entire building transformed into a warehouse. The chapel held twelve pallets, the old pantry waiting area eight, and the spot by the desk three. The dining room held up to twenty. Once we cleared out the garage it could hold about twenty. It was a massive game of Tetris, trial and error on a daily basis until we found a groove. I became more obsessed with pallets, they ruled my life. I remember the first day we served 250 people pantry bags in April 2020. When I left in August 2022 we served an average of 800 people two bags each, one shelf-stable and one perishable.

When I came home I would take my clothes off in the hallway and walk straight into the shower. I dreamed of burning those clothes. My job was to be on the outside, in the world, go to work, bring home food and some wine. Vince’s job was to clean. He also made friends with a cashier at Rite Aid who would tell him when toilet paper would get restocked. Our laundromat closed, so we did washed clothes in the kitchen sink. I started driving to work. The first time I got gas, at the BP on Myrtle, I just thought of how many people had touched everything I touched, the credit card screen, the pump, all that tactile horror and nooks and crannies for germs to linger. The day the hospital got a refrigerated morgue truck I cried as I drove past it. After work I’d go to AD’s house down the street for mezcal, a freezer cigarette, and a recap of the day. I called it The Stoop. It was my bar.

The city constructed hospitals in Central Park and the Javits Center, a convention center in Midtown Manhattan. We took donations of the leftover meals for staff and patients, I tried to gauge how those hospitals were faring by the number of to-go boxes. For months we received two free pallets of gallons of milk on Tuesdays from Food Bank. We kept one for ourselves and gave the other one to the community fridges. We couldn’t store both. I said yes to everything and figured it out later. So many people mobilized to feed their neighbors, community groups like Hungry Monks, the fridge people who could get bikes and cars together at what felt like the drop of a hat, and regular people setting up neighborhood pantries. I knew I could find a home for the food, regardless of expiration dates and storage problems.

I didn’t know how to be. Sometimes I would just sit down on the bed and cry. We left town for a week in September, after realizing it didn’t make a difference which states we had to quarantine after visiting. Delaware, where we went, was high on the quarantine list because of poultry workers, but we were so used to isolating it didn’t matter. For the first two days I re-read a book, I couldn’t handle anything new, and I couldn’t talk. I stared at the sky, wrapped in a blanket, hoping the grief and anxiety would slowly evaporate off of me.

I probably had a breakdown a few times. The day the COVID numbers spiked after that first Halloween, in early November, I hyperventilated walking our dog to the park, overwhelmed and scared the city would shut down again. Then I realized the city would never shut down again, that nothing would probably ever be done for the good of public health in this country again. We noticed too many things, we cared too much, we demanded too much, we knew this country could be better.

I’ve got a knack for disaster, or maybe I have a knack for warehouses. I don’t always care enough about myself, but I learned to during that time. I started to believe in my nervous system, that it actually existed, and does impact my life. I learned how much I desperately needed rest, physical, mental, emotional, something hard to understand as someone who was taught to just push through. Sleep! What a beautiful thing. I got COVID so many times when having it once was supposed to grant some immunity, my doctor almost sent me for study. I started to wonder if I was indestructible, or if I was going to drop dead immediately, both interchangeable thoughts. That’s a weird head space to live in.

I know we’ve all lived in some weird places.

I don’t have a way to end this. There is no end, none of this is over. My friend Holly, who is much smarter than I am, said COVID would be something that affects people for generations when we spoke five years ago in March 2020. It shocked me to hear that then, we all thought this pause thing would be a month or two. But it lasted much longer, and the reverberations from COVID linger still, in ways we refuse to respect and acknowledge for the sake of feeling triumphant. While I’m not interested in living in the past, I know we have to honor it and learn from it. There’s a bad moon on the rise, I think we all sense that, especially with what’s happening in DC. I wonder what the next one will look like. I wonder how we will fare. I wonder if using a pallet jack is like riding a bike.

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