Diary: Laura Henriksen

I’m visited by David Berman and his mom in a dream. A van parked sideways across multiple spots at the furthest edge of a small parking lot at a strip mall. The striking difference in temperature and light between the afternoon sun and the shade of the mall portico. The van is a tomb and it both represents and brings death. First David Berman enters and then his mom follows, saying something about here being as good as anywhere. I wake up crying.

I feel lucky the quarantine is in spring when there’s so much activity to watch out the window, because I live a life where I can sit at the window and watch the pale green inflorescence emergence and look at pictures of my naked friends and their food on Instagram. I wonder how a person can say essential and mean disposable. I feel more confused than usual about the value of my labor and how much I am worth to the state alive, as others are killed so I can eat. I feel more clearly than ever before the ways not only my comfort but my continued existence floats like a dirty feather on an ocean of Black death. The wind picks up to such a pitch the trees shake their branches like women in postures of mourning.

The last movie I saw in theaters before quarantine started was The Shining. It’s a horror movie about the chasm of violence that endlessly, endlessly swallows this country and the thin veil of historicism that attempts to disguise the mass grave that is the United States. In one of my favorite scenes, Wendy, a domestic abuse survivor, attempts to casually explain her husband’s drunken attack on their child to another woman, a doctor, who listens to her story, concerned, but powerless to help. Later Jack will repeat the story to a ghost bartender who will urge him to greater acts of violence. The movie, while apparently representing the psychological damage of extended isolation, reminds us that we are never for one moment alone, not from the dead, making and unmaking us and the world, the elevator doors forever opening so the blood can pour and pour.

I’m watching another horror film when I start to feel sick, Shutter, a great addition to both the avenging angel and the secret messages from the spirit world transmitted through technological reproduction horror subgenres. Or that’s not true, I’ve felt sick intermittently for weeks, but I’ve assumed it was the stress, which maybe it was, I normally resist any diagnostic impulse to get from my body any explanation for its behaviors and failings and needs, accepting all anomalies as just part of the mystery of embodiment. But this particular Friday night my body starts to ache in a strange way, as if I’ve been wrapped up real tight in bonds that only tighten. The next day I feel worse, and on the third day I take to bed like a gothic heroine, and I haven’t yet gotten up again.

After David Berman died, I listened to the song where he sings goodbye, “Tennessee” from the 2001 album, Bright Flight. “We're off to the land of club soda unbridled / We're off to the land of hot middle-aged women,” which sounds certainly like a type of heaven, or one of heaven’s many wings. At the very start of quarantine, when it isn’t really quarantine, I dream Morgan’s ex-girlfriend needs a place to stay and so has to come live with us. She’s a hot middle-aged woman and we both understand immediately how I am inferior to her in all ways. She’s beautiful and cruel and treats me like I’m stupid and I make her breakfast and wonder what I should do. I know in part the dream is about the fear I feel that my generosity should fail me, that I will not give away freely what I have, that I would miser and hoard in fear when the time comes for me to return to the commons I claim to long for so much.

When my fever gets really bad, I stop dreaming completely. Instead, it’s like someone turned the TV on in my head, or rather the equivalent of a mid-sized sports bar’s worth of TVs all playing at once. I hear voices but I don’t understand them. I think, “Who is thinking these thoughts?” I think I can hear my fever. It’s cacophonous. I get scared. I take a cold shower and cry and cry.

The day Bernie Sanders announces his campaign suspension my fever reaches 104.5° and a rash that spreads across my wrists and breasts and face makes it clear I am allergic to the antibiotic I’ve been prescribed to avoid pneumonia and other secondary sicknesses. I cry some more. I wish this type of mobilization had been focused on the end of all presidents rather than electing one. But the pleasure of collectively imagining a different world, even if only different in degree and not kind, was infectious, like playing a nationwide game of light as a feather, stiff as a board, only to unceremoniously tumble back to the living room floor, winded and sore.

I can’t leave the bedroom, but I’ve grown so accustomed to monitoring the incremental growth of the trees lining 63rd Street that Morgan facetimes with me from the bay windows in the living room so I can check the size and color of their leaves. I feel like a burden, which is the worst feeling. Disinfecting everything I touch in the bathroom, I feel like a poisonous snail, also a bad feeling, although not unfamiliar, to be afraid of your own trace and the harm it causes to anyone who will follow where you’ve been.

The last event I went to when it was still possible to gather was a conversation at Danspace with Saidiya Hartman, Simone Leigh, and Okwui Okpokwasili. They talked about Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, describing her alone in her Paris room, working on her sculptures, diligent as a sibyl on a mission. They talked about the feeling of, upon emerging from one's solitary efforts, discovering that others had been working with you all along, that you were never in fact alone in your room, but always part of something stretching and vast. The word they used, I believe, was chorus.

Morgan and I moved in together on March 1. Ten days later we would all but stop leaving the apartment, along with basically everyone else we know, participating as we do in the abstracted, immaterial, nonessential labor of the post-industrial creative class. 

I read that “honeymoon” comes from a tradition of the groom being gifted mead by the bride’s father for the first month of their marriage. I also read it refers to the waning, like the moon, of affection over time. I read about love, that its terror comes from the gradual disintegration of the archetypal stories lovers tell themselves about who they are in relation to other people, because in love it is no longer possible to instrumentalize other people, they can no longer remain props and ornaments in the telling of the linear narrative called “my life.” I read that love’s terror comes from the way it dismantles the fantasy of a static and consistent identity, shining through the porous boundaries between self and other, self and other and world like rays of light through clouds. The way a virus betrays the dream of stable boundaries, of containable bodies and temporally-bound events. 

In love everything is alive. In love I find the unknowable on full display, and all the more mysterious so laid out. The sky at night, the remembered ocean. When he makes me cum I feel time exhale, I feel myself a teenager and in middle-age all present within me, and I feel all temporal parts of him too. I mean that was before, now I have a highly contagious virus and can’t touch anything.

When I start to feel better, I read the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, who describes the appearance of clouds as if she were telling a story. On my birthday but in 1798 she wrote, “The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows.” 

At least I never feel lonely. Or I mean of course I do, but at least I know I am not alone.

I have found it impossible to sit in this apartment without imagining all the people dying in their apartments. I wonder who they will haunt, I wonder if they will haunt their landlords. The building I live in is one hundred years old, and I wonder who has died here before me. Some days are gray and some days are blue and that’s the only way I can tell them apart. The appearance of uniformity is really an illusion, I remind myself. Every day is different, full of people who are different from the day before. For example, one day was Easter, the rest were not. 

Fanny Howe writes, “Time is more like a failed resurrection than a measure of passage.” I wonder if the resurrection in question failed because you can’t resurrect what’s not dead, or if it’s because you can’t measure a passage that doesn’t occur. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge writes, “Love is a measurement.” I would take Love’s temperature, pull Love’s hair into a ponytail and wrap a strand of hair around the tie, just to make it nice. I would be Death’s maiden, carefully drive Death’s car through the night. Death would sit in the back and look out the window at the trees. Overhead, the clouds in their stillness give the feeling that this world is a painting or a set with a mistake in it that even as you cannot precisely locate you nevertheless perceive, creating a sensation of pervasive unreality. At all moments I can feel my heart twitching in my chest. I can’t tell if it’s a symptom or just stress but I try to accept it as a comfort, like eating candy in a public park, like walking mindlessly around a grocery store, like picking up an apple and then putting it back down again, like the cold of the subway pole in the summer, like leaning forward in a crowded room to hear better what someone said, like touching anything at all.

Laura Henriksen is the author of October Poems (Gloss, 2019), Canadian Girlfriends (THERETHEN, 2019), Agata (Imp, 2017), and Fluid Arrangements (Planthouse Gallery, 2018) with Beka Goedde. Her writing can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, P-Queue, Foundry, High Noon, and other places.