The problem with talking about seeing the light at the end of a tunnel is that it presumes that you are in a tunnel, a unpleasant place, dark, and that you will see, at the end of this, something hopeful, an end to your suffering, light. A light you will want to go to. Emerging, blinking, dumbfounded, into a new fresh bright reality. Well that’s not really the problem; the problem is that it leaves out my father’s joke about the light being an oncoming train. But I digress.

When I have emerged from darkness, blinking, as I say, dumbfounded into a new fresh bright reality, my main feeling is that there has been a revelation, that I have learned something, which something I promptly forget when I plunge back into darkness again. My life in this way feels less like a nice straightforward journey by train, from tunnel to light, and more like a carousel, going in circles. A noisy circus ride, endlessly up and down on the same horse and then a moment when I catch a glimpse of myself in one of the mirrors on the center pole and I see everything with sudden clarity. Then the horse keeps going, the alignment breaks, I lose sight of that moment, epiphany glides into memory, is gone. The cacophony of calliope music, the pre-recorded organs of hell, until at some point we align again and I remember: Oh, right, this clarity, I knew this once, here it is again. At this point all I’m hoping for is that when the ride grinds to a halt I’ll be in a bright spot, though in any case the ride will have ended.

I was in therapy last week gazing at my kind therapist’s kind face. He has a terrible haircut, the balding ponytail look and on the greasy side usually. I can’t take him entirely seriously because of that but when I’m talking he looks at me full in the eyes like he has nowhere he’d rather be and I appreciate that. Also sometimes he looks genuinely moved by stories I tell him and sometimes I’d pay for that, so I do. I was telling him a story about how I was working on believing I was loved whether or not people said it out loud, and it felt like a great insight was coming on except I could see that he saw it coming because he’d seen it before, I’d seen it before, nothing new. Turkey in the Straw.

Okay but what if I think of it as a train ride? What if I imagine the revelation that I told Dr. Anton last week as being a train ride through a tunnel, to the light at the end. What if I imagine a train. A compartment. You and I in a train compartment, two people sitting across from each other. What if I imagine we are traveling somewhere, somewhere we have never traveled, gladly beyond, so to speak. The train is central European, the seats the cheap but durable wine-red vinyl of every train seat, forty plus years of sausages and lard-smeared bread eaten by people sitting here, forty plus years of beer cans bought at the train station and popped once the train is in motion, forty plus years of children who didn’t want to sit still, grandmothers whose support hose constricted at the waist and inevitably sagged at the ankles, couples trying to lessen the monotony of their relationship by taking it on a trip. We have already run out of things to say and we are sitting in what I like to imagine is a companionable silence though I’m not looking at your face in case anything there contradicts me.

I see the tunnel as we approach it and I see my chance. Before we go in, I force my eyes into yours. “Why won’t you just say that you love me sometimes?” I ask, and then we are plunged into darkness. My plan, to the extent that I have one, is that you will tell me the truth in the dark. This is why I have always preferred darkness: because that’s where the truth is. Late at night, the house will tell you where it hurts; the tiniest wind and it creaks and moans. People whisper the best secrets in the dark. And even my own darkness is so much more true to me than my own light. So we will enter the tunnel now. You will tell me the truth. Here, in the darkness.

But the tunnel is too short. I always forget that European tunnels are shorter than their Asian counterparts. As if they know that what can happen in the dark is more trouble than they want. A scream. A murder. So we’re plunged into the light at the end of the tunnel in no time, and I haven’t even shifted my eyes from your face yet. I have the full brunt of your gaze when you say it.

“I won’t say I love you because I don’t.”

That’s it then, the light. The revelation. The moment of blinding, absolute clarity. The thing I could have seen coming, if I’d looked.

*joined a writing group and this was the prompt

So how are you doing? I can't quite pin down how things feel; some days completely normal, others so suffused with strangeness that I can't breathe (and then I think: am I sick? is this what difficulty breathing feels like?). I find that I have very strong opinions, which I guess I usually do, but I mean even stronger. And then sometimes I have an opinion that barely even feels like anything, a thought that could be blown over by the least wind. 

On March 8, the play I was organizing closed after three sold-out amazing performances. I was socially exhausted and made a note to myself that I needed to dial it back a bit. A group of friends was planning a trip to New York and I decided not to go, partly because I'd been in the US twice already in 2020, partly for financial reasons, partly because I needed some quiet time. On March 12, the Czech government announced that as of March 13 restaurants would be closed from 8 pm. I went out for a drink with some friends and it felt so strange I couldn't stay, though I wasn't sure at the time and am not sure in retrospect whether it felt like we were being risky or whether it was part of my needing to be away from people. 

On the 14th and 15th, we held auditions for the next play in my apartment because the club we normally have them in was closed. I wiped everything down with disinfectant before and after each audition. We were mostly quiet; somber I guess. I still can't say whether it was my existing social exhaustion or whether I felt it then, what was coming. I remember one man going through the cabinets in the kitchen looking for tea, and I felt like screaming stop touching my things, and that was either when I started being afraid or realized I was already afraid. On the 16th, everything except food stores closed down, gatherings of more than 2 people were forbidden, masks were required, boom. Nobody on the street but dog walkers. Little sound other than birds and ambulances. 

Between March 12 and April 17 I think I left the house once. One person came over. I sat on the balcony sometimes, watching people in masks go to or from the grocery store or walk their dogs, women with a widening gray stripe in the center of their hair, men really expressing themselves with their mask choices. I thought for a while that everyone looked worried, but then I decided to think they looked neutral and they looked that way. Now I imagine them happy. When your face is hidden it's really hard to tell. 

I filled out a map form to mark where I usually go and where I go now, and my apartment and most of the places I go are in the same square so nothing's changed. I was already working from home so nothing's changed. I used to see people on video calls that I couldn't see in person so nothing's changed. I helped translate some political stuff for free and I donated money to local causes so nothing's changed. 

I've watched a lot of television and I love television so that makes me happy. I wanted to start exercising when the play finished and I've started exercising and I don't love it but I do it every day anyway. I wanted to take a break from alcohol and I mostly have though since I haven't been in situations where I wanted it that doesn't seem so impressive. I did standup and an open mic night online and both of those were pleasant experiences, though they were also the only time I felt that I missed people in general. 

The shutdown was thorough and people were pretty compliant. In the last week so few people have died here. They're reopening businesses here, letting groups hang out again, removing a lot of restrictions. Masks still required in public. I honestly feel like they're trying to increase the infection rate a little so they can shut things down again. Like all governments I see a T-Rex, incompetence in the comically tiny arms and ravenous cruelty in the teeth. Even if this one is more benevolent than the one I come from, it's ultimately self-serving and whenever I feel like I don't know what it's doing, I believe it's doing something to feed itself.

I don't know, I feel okay. I just wanted to write this down, so I wouldn't forget how it felt. Sometimes it felt like a lot. Sometimes it didn't feel like anything. Maybe what is unusual isn't how it feels, but that I've had so much time to think about how it feels? I guess that's a good thing, generally.  

I'm fine. I mean, I'm fine. Solitude and self-reflection has always been kind of my default state, you know. Staring at walls. I was saying I need a break a long time before this happened. Already said which day would be my last day in a group of more than three people. So the government said two but that's okay. I mean it's fine. More than fine really, because now there are phones and the internet so I don't even have to miss anybody. Well of course I do, intensely, but I don't have to. Sure I think about death but I think about death all the time anyway. Maybe this is a living abroad thing, that you become keenly aware at some point that you will die far away from where you were born, not only far from the place but the people, far away from the girls you played hopscotch with, if you played hopscotch, the boys you kissed in empty classrooms during recess, if you kissed boys at all, the people you once had long phone conversations with, kinking and straightening the phone cord's coils as the conversation lagged, lifted, fell silent, back when we said goodbye before we left the conversation. We used to tell people to stop talking by clipping imaginary scissors in the air, as if to cut the cord; now we slash our own throats. All far away now. The first time I moved nobody died but we never spoke again anyway and the second time I moved a lot of people died and the third time I moved I was gone so long that whether or not they died a lot of people disappeared. Of course, some disappearances are a relief, a blessed silence. And some conversations continue in my head still. My fingers make a tentative snip in the air but I'm not ready to end those conversations. Sometimes you don't even have to move and the conversation ends anyway and I guess that's okay. Dragging my fingers across my throat, the words can't come out now, can they? I miss them, of course I miss them, but they aren't there anymore, not the way I miss them. One night I dreamed I was talking to a person about someone I had lost and they were the same person. See this is why I needed a break anyway. I mean I'm fine. One thing I did in addition to work which continues to roll in and insist on being so ordinary and normal and lovely, thank you work, you've always been there for me, anyway one thing I did was read through a virtual stack of letters looking for patterns. I look at the person I was and I think how was I that person. I see myself there like some caged animal where I am trying so hard to be myself and to be right and natural, a representative of myself in my own habitat, more or less, and I am also throwing shit at the bars of my prison, the spectators, zoos are terrible and it was myself put me in there. Do you know how hard it is to stay authentically yourself when part of that authentic self wishes more than anything to be loved. How many conversations have you had in which you translated your words from your own rich native language into a formula by which you hoped to be understood. I'm honestly not sure I know how to communicate any other way anymore. Consciously or otherwise, what's my goal here, that's what I'm moving towards. Sometimes I forget to ask what your goal is but sometimes everybody's goals are so damn clear. The last time I went out in public there were so many people, speaking and speaking, and each of them was saying listen to me like me admire me, nothing more, over and over, and they shouted over each other and I couldn't hear anything but their shouting and I left because I'm not sure I'm different. I would like to be.

In 1989, I moved to Japan. This was seven years after AIDS was first clinically reported in the United States, after Reagan's press secretary had laughed about it, after Rock Hudson. But it was before things got really bad, before I understood how bad they would get. My move was not connected, but it is related to my perception of things. I moved to Japan, and as this was obviously before facebook, before the internet, I lost contact with a lot of my friends in what felt like a natural way. People change, their priorities change, we move away, move on. When I came back three years later, it seemed to me that about a third of the people I'd known were dead. Frankly, considering my friend circles, it's a very low number. Some friends, like me, got scared and careful early. Some of my friends are HIV positive and taking medication and surviving well. Some of us are just ridiculously lucky, I guess. This feels to me like a dark time I lived through, because I have suffered some of the repercussions of it (Michael, who introduced me to Cocteau Twins, dead; Tim, who loved movies, dead; Jason, who just wanted to be loved so badly, dead…). But I didn't, I wasn't there, I only heard about it, I saw the art and felt profoundly moved, read in the paper about the loss and knew the world was shifting but I didn't live through it like my friends who stayed on the ground tending sores and making phone calls to estranged families and the bleak and terrible humor of San Francisco real estate prices.

Every World AIDS Day (other days, too, of course) I think about this. I know the epidemic is going on still, which is just impossible to fathom for me. But I think particularly about where I was when I became aware of it. It's not my pain being commemorated. I don't have a right to speak. But I also think about what world we are in now, the loss of those voices, we are all still suffering. Some of my friends would have done nothing interesting. Some would have turned out to be people I didn't talk to anyway. Surely this is true of the population at large. Not every loss needs to be tragic to be a loss. The powerful play goes on, though, and they might have contributed a verse. What would art be like now, what would politics be, if those voices hadn't been silenced.

I don't know. I looked away for a minute and the landscape shifted. Sometimes I wonder if my focused extreme attention on people who don't necessarily appreciate it is related to that, to the fear that if I blink I might lose them. If you lost someone to AIDS, I am so sorry for your loss. 

I get up in the morning with Squire and have an egg on toast, usually a fried egg but I'm trying to be a little healthy so these days a boiled egg, sliced using a kitchen gadget. It's a popup toaster; I would prefer a toaster oven for almost everything except toast. I make coffee in a French press; I used to use a drip coffee maker but found that cleaning it was annoying plus the look of horror on my dearest coffee lover's face after she took a sip convinced me to upgrade. Milk and sugar these days, needing the extra sweetness in a bitter world, but usually just black. I put a spoonful of homemade cherry syrup in a glass of water and use that to choke down vitamin pills, including vitamin D which doesn't make a perceptible difference but maybe it makes some difference anyway. We watch 20 minutes of television while we eat breakfast as neither of us is very chatty in the morning. News commentary is great, good sitcoms are better.

After breakfast, dishes, and maybe tea, and then all the social media stuff that I should cut back on and don't. Someone's wrong on the internet and I can't start working until I've seen it all. I don't read the news regularly anymore because it messes me up; sometimes I fall down an internet hole of researching something meaningless but at least it doesn't leave me with catatonic nihilism. Every day I think I should quit and every day I read at least one thing that makes me want to keep going, keep connecting. The traveling bookstore off on another adventure. My friend's daughter's Halloween costume ideas. An article about grief. People I have loved and am far away from, people I haven't met and have come to love, remember when we had to make dates to meet by mail?

Then work. Work and then a snack and then work and green tea, a cigarette break, and then work more. I love what I do although lately I feel like it's harder and harder to focus, my brain keeps skittering off into different directions, as if trying to swim through a heavily salted sea, constantly bouncing back up to the surface, on my back watching seagulls and clouds despite my desire to sink beneath the surface, tranquility and coral and marvelous fish always beyond my reach.

Sometimes I meet a friend for lunch and sometimes for afternoon coffee. It's the best possible season now, fall that's really fall this year, with leaves dying in all colors of a fire and leaving marvelously crunchy piles to kick through. Also scarves. In May when we went to New York for a wedding I bought a leather coat in a secondhand store and every time I wear it I am with my sister, my son, my now-married friends in love, Adirondack chairs. The buttons on the coat are a little loose and I should sew them on better at some point, though I'm not sure if special needles or something are required; I've never sewn through leather. In the afternoon if I'm not out I send invoices, check the internet pools to see if I've caught any fish, nap if I can. Do laundry, write email, stay useful.

In the evening I finish the work I dithered over during the day or sometimes I go out. There are friends who can't drink me under the table but then I can't seem to get them under the table either so we sit there with the bottle on the table in front of us and tell each other increasing truths until one of us realizes it's well past time to go home and goes. Some evenings there are open mic nights or theater rehearsals that may or may not involve some or several of the same friends and the same realizations. Some evenings I laugh so hard I think I might not stop, and some evenings I cry the same way.

At night I clean up because it's nice to wake up in a clean home. I brush my teeth and put on enough night-cream to resemble a 50s cartoon of a woman. I fall asleep as soon as I've packed the pillows around me or I fall asleep reading and wake up 30 minutes later to turn off the light. Sometimes I wake up in the night and lie there paralyzed by anxiety I can't name for an hour or two; sometimes I sleep through until the sun filters through the cracks between the curtains.

We changed the clocks last night. There is nothing that interesting about my life, but it seems very satisfying to me. I feel like the world is going to end soon and I try not to think about it but it's a factor in some decisions: If the world ends, will I regret having not done this? Mostly my life is things that I have chosen, things I want. And I get that you don't want it, because if you wanted it you'd only need to reach out your hand. I am really usually okay with that, because it's hardly new, but sometimes it stings behind my eyes and I look at my day from the outside and think: What's not to love? Don't answer that.