Love Blossoms In the Most Unexpected Places
Untold stories from the last 3 years
Photo by Anna Shvets
Last night I had the joy of being in a lovely writer’s group that I started attending during the pandemic with a friend on the West Coast (go check out
Substack).One of the things we wrote on, without going off on a tangent, was what’s holding us back. Our writing, us as people, our relationships, etc. I made this long list of things from the past 3 years and as I journaled about those things, I shared the revelation with my group that I feel like I’m finally swimming easily now, or floating, maybe. And now that I’m no longer struggling to swim or caught in a riptide, I’d rather not revisit what it was like when I was.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
So here’s a little bit of what I wrote about the 2020-2023 years to get us started:
“As far as I’m concerned, the time between March 6th, 2020 and February of 2023 is mostly a memory I can’t quite seem to conjure up. It’s just… gone. I mean, sure, I remember I did that yoga teacher training- that was cool. I went on a retreat- super fun. Honestly? I just don’t remember the rest of it.
I do, actually. There was a pandemic, and right when the pandemic happened, my grandfather died, but not because of the pandemic, because he was old. And that was hard, but it was okay. I also graduate from college during all of this and that was hard, but I was eventually fine. Then, I did a year of graduate school. Decided I didn’t want to go to medical school after all, so I moved home. Yes, I was going to get in! Just had to take the MCAT. Moved through a bunch of jobs after I got home until I landed on doing freelance writing full time in October of 2022. I had already started doing it part time in college as an EMT, so it was a natural transition.
Yeah, that’s the curated version of the story. The truth is that the pandemic was the hardest thing that’s ever happened to me. It changed my life and it changed me, and I’ve psychoanalyzed the difficult experiences into perpetuity. Here’s what I learned. It doesn’t matter how many times you write down exactly how you remember getting that phone call no one ever wants to get about saying goodbye to the person you never thought you would have to say goodbye to - the grief is stuck so much deeper than that narrative you’ve told yourself.”
I really do love those beautiful stories I write about what happened. I’ve internalized those narratives so deeply. I certainly don’t blame myself for crafting stories around what was arguably the most difficult time in my life. One night, I was on a bad date, and the next morning, my grandfather was dying and so were a lot more people and so were my dreams of normalcy.
So.
It’s not time to move on. It’s time to move through. I want to tell the stories that don’t get told because I’m too sad about them or because I’ve told myself they don’t matter. I want to remember. I’m ready. I invite you to come with me.
Photo by Adonyi Gábor
My Life Raft
I returned to my home in Philadelphia in late March of 2020, no longer able to make excuses to myself for staying home, unable to bear the thought of wallowing in my own grief.
I was a college senior. I had things to do, places to be - and this would all be over soon. If class was going to be called off, I wanted to be with my friends. The days blended into one another as we attended class in our pajamas and annoyed each other with the weight of our emotions. A house that had once seemed so big when 4 girls had been coming and going constantly now seemed poised to eat us up. Clothes from the hospital in the bathroom? Burn them. Doorknobs? Wipe them. No one was safe.
But all we had was each other, so we made it work, at least for a little bit. We drank a little too much and had dance parties on the top floor because we had nothing else to do. I rose with the sun and did yoga on the roof outside my roommate’s window, hoping that I was getting under her skin the same way she got under mine.
It wasn’t the most emotionally stable time for any of us, and when someone who looked like emotional stability came along, I latched on. Quickly.
He(who shall remain anonymous) and I had met a year prior - in Argentina, both American- and I had deemed him to be an even less suitable choice for me at the time. He had an irresistible appeal, I won’t deny that - he was charming, sweet, kind, and a little mischievous.
If you had told me that I would fly across the country for the same man who had once vomited in the street in front of me at the end of a first date, I would have laughed in your face, and then some.
But nothing was certain during the pandemic. There are things I don’t even remember, like when we started talking again, or how quickly it evolved.
He was a thread throughout 2020 for me, and then he was gone, and. And. Nothing. Like so many other things, people, there was no real closure there. I had to provide it for myself.
We broke up in a spectacularly ugly fashion on Thanksgiving Day. At least, it was ugly for me. I imagine he was relieved, as one who feels they aren’t currently emotionally available may be. I was so frustrated I accidentally texted him, “what a WHORE!” a text meant for my best friend.
Like I say often, say it behind their backs, not to their face. About exes. I’m not condoning speaking badly about others. Unless you just need to vent and don’t mean it, because I do that all of the time.
I have trouble letting go of people as it is, and then, we were all stuck in a pandemic. Life or death. Online classes. Complete upheaval. He was my life raft from the moment he offered to make me a quarantine playlist. I mean, romantic!
We texted and face timed fervently for months, reprieving each other from the stuck-ness we felt as half-adults living with our parents or roommates that were driving us insane. We built a relationship on deep conversation, which might sound romantic, but is not. It allows the two people to lie to each other, and perhaps more significantly, themselves, about what they really want out of the relationship and what they’re really willing to put in.
I flew out to visit him twice- both with 9 hour layovers in the Chicago airport- to beautiful microcosms of a loving, supportive relationship. Of course, there was a little something missing- but I couldn’t quite place my finger on what, and I didn’t want to.
The meals made together, the inside jokes, the bike rides (throughout which I complained as fervently as we had face timed) and the shared love of Argentine culture comprised the building blocks of a little world we built together outside of the new normal we were each individually finding.
Of course, that new normal still involved covid. So when my brother and 500 of his closest friends got it the Thanksgiving that he was meant to come and visit, they saved me from the embarrassment of introducing someone I was never meant to be with to my family- and they were all fine, luckily.
I was crushed that year, of course. It was our first Covid thanksgiving, and it sucked. Although my mom did a great job of making it really fun. I had tried so hard to make it resemble normal, something I had been grasping at for months in the form of the logical next step in my career, a relationship, outings with friends, and normal could not be forced.
I don’t talk or write about our relationship ever because I write it off as not mattering. And in some regard, that’s true. It’s also untrue. If I hadn’t dated him, I wouldn’t have been put on the path to where I am now. I also think not talking about my pandemic experiences - and the people that held me up during it, whether those relationships were healthy or not- is a part of my “one-sentence treatment” of the pandemic.
“The pandemic happened, but now everything’s okay”.
Actually, a lot happened between 2020 and now and it drastically changed and shaped who I am. I would be a fool to pretend that that relationship- the last serious one I had before I met my fiance- didn’t matter to me. It did, greatly. It anchored me to our shared past, a past that was simpler and that I was also still mourning leaving behind in Buenos Aires. It gave me hope for the future at times when it felt like there was none, because often in 2020, it was hard to imagine a future, at least by myself - but with another person, it became easier.
I don’t think he ever knew how much he really mattered to me. Maybe that’s a gross underestimation of this person, but he gave me some of the biggest smiles and laughs during a very dark time in my life. Right up until I didn’t really need them anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, that Thanksgiving breakup is a killer breakup story, but by then I had some more life rafts.
I’ll always be grateful for the role he played in my life when he did. It would be so easy to write off because of the pandemic or because it was a largely long distance relationship - but I think that would do a disservice to how much power one human has to shape another’s life.
Here’s to the sunsets, the squirrel spottings, the frozen pizza nights, the vulnerability, that very first date in Barrio Chino, and some of the best playlists.
I want to keep writing these pandemic stories, and I’m going to. I don’t know how often, but I know that they matter, even if it feels like they don’t. I hope by writing down what I’ve held in for so long, I can move through it.
I’d love to hear how you relate to your pandemic experiences and if you feel like you’ve fully processed them.
xx
Camille
I’m still picking apart my pandemic experiences - they feel like they happened to someone else, and I know that means I really need to keep dealing with them. It was a messy time for me, and really really hard. Compounded with a difficult professional situation that came to a head in the spring of 2020, I know I’m going to be unpacking it for a while to come.