There’s something about purgatory that’s always felt right to me. I’ve long imagined a specific bliss of bouncing through the absence of everything. Like this tugging insistence that my very best self could only be compatible with floating around the in-between, reclined atop an eternal inflatable donut.
It’s a space out of time, I think that’s what I mean. What could possibly go wrong in a nowhere place? There would be only a stillness, in which I might sit in a pause. An anti-existence, full of possibility and never certainty, where nothing ever starts and nothing ever stops. No doorbells to screech at me and no dust asking to get vacuumed. No traffic or raincoats or errands, no angry friends or avoidant ex-lovers or parents facing the guilt of hindsight. Merely, simply, a nothing; it’s the only type of heaven I’ve ever considered.
On the day I realized I was finally there in the non-place of my delusions, or as close as I’d ever get, it was, in truth, everything I ever hoped. Silent, easy, beautiful, and entirely my own. It was not so long after that, though, when things started to go wonky. The clocks somehow still ticked their defiance, my nowhereland still needed to be heated, and I discovered a body still attached that required tending for its functions. Most of all, in all my dreams of the place between blinks, I never imagined it so flooded with snow, or so full of my very own rage.
*
“It is APRIL for FUCK’S sake!” I yelled to the window. “What the FUCK are you doing here?”
The sky, still giddily dropping its little cotton turds, did not reply. Normally this wouldn’t come as a surprise, but in that unprecedented time, frankly, it could have gone either way for me. I half expected the next falling flake to screech out a “Well fuck you too, Julie!” on its way down, one of its crystalline edges pointed straight up high in what I’d have to assume is a scorching insult in the poles.
I hadn’t noticed the storm at first. I’d spent the morning rolling around in bed with the curtains drawn, hungover from spending too much time with myself. At some point I relocated to the couch, to give my tedium a change of scenery, and it was then that I noticed the intrusion. The living room should have been awash with the glow of fresh spring. The day before had promised the season’s change, with delicate little buds on trees just about to pop. The windows should have now framed the green fuzz of regrowth. Instead, upon slogging my aching corpus into the kitchen, I was confronted by a flat greyness. Grey, all grey, everywhere grey, highlighted only by outlines of lighter fucking grey. It was as if all vitality had been sucked from the landscape, stifled by the burden of its own regeneration, and left in its place was a death.
It was April, a Sunday in the pandemic, and the sky had the audacity to snow.
I spent the next hours of the afternoon counting down to dinnertime, but in dinnertime there loomed a calamity, when I would no longer be able to ignore that I spent yesterday avoiding an errand. How careless it became, simply avoiding the grocery store. The fridge showed condiments, a wrinkly tomato, and, inexplicably, three jars of pickled onions. The pantry was in a similar state. For a while, I could sit on the couch, safe indoors. For a while, I could watch the window and pretend it was beautiful out there, like they all say. But by dinnertime, I would be forced to confront that I had no choice but to leave the house, a failure of my own doing, and venture into the snowstorm of an apocalyptic spring.
I kept thinking it was going to slow down so I tried to wait it out. That’s kind of how everything felt those days, though, just waiting it out. But the flakes outside kept falling with an urgency I hadn’t seen since curfew was lifted. I wondered why they were in such a hurry; they were in no danger of a fine no matter how inappropriately late they were. Finally, many miserable avoidant hours later, with my innards starting to scream, I encased myself in my heaviest coat and I left, furiously, into the April winter.
*
Amsterdam was quiet in the snow. It was Sunday afternoon so the ones who dared to commute were tucked safely inside, and everyone who still Believed had already made peace with their gods for the week. The snow wasn’t sticking long to the ground, so there was nothing to draw out the neighbor kids with their snowballs and their shrieks. A single cyclist wobbled past, bravely placing their trust in inertia. But mostly it was just me, stomping through the storm.
As an immigrant there will always be something about the locals that forever seems absurd. For me, one thing is their huge living room windows right there on street level. It’s a constant invitation to peer into every home, and a chance to curse them all for remembering to stock their fridges. The second thing is how the Dutch evade existence. Not why—that part is clear enough, especially these days—it’s their methods I don’t get: they stand. They say it all the time, it’s right there in the words.
In Dutch, nothing can ever be, it always has to stand, or sit. Ik sta in deze foto, they might say; I stand in this photo. Ik zit in het vliegtuig, ik zit te wachten; I sit in the airplane, I sit waiting. Never am. The best they can do is take their body and pose it in the likeness of an action and plop it in a place, but they’d never admit to being there. As if they ascribe selfhood, or whatever it means to be, only to things that are incredibly worthy of being. I am Julie, they could say. Some things might still matter, but for all the rest, it’s better to simply sit.
The wildest one is that the Dutch won’t even admit to being on fire. Ik sta in brand, they say, I stand in fire. Like they just stand there, unconcerned and aflame. Literally physically on fire, while their being is off somewhere else, waiting for whatever is worthy of existence. I’ve wondered if it’s nice there, wherever they wait, if they feel awake, or if they feel hot. I would hope it’s a peaceful place, where everything stands still and the only thing they know of is to wait for the call over the loudspeaker that being is ready, get in line, it’s time for takeoff. Their purgatory must be busy, then, full of people, perhaps a bit like an airport. Now that I think about it, there’s something about departure terminals that’s always felt right to me, too.
*
The last time I departed from an airport, I saw the entirety of every face. There were no distanced dots for standing in line, no one coveted test results over passport colors, and people sneezed with abandon. It was regular and everyone was normal. There was the quiet late-night buzz of the day’s final bursts of energy, and a barstool that seemed perfectly mediocre.
From afar, the airport bar looked confused, like all airport bars do, as if they can’t understand where they are. The one in front of me had three wood-paneled walls that attempted to compensate for the rushing din of boarding lines where the fourth should have been. Its waiters wore black buttoned blouses and white aprons. Bowled lamps dropped from the ceiling overtop each table, all giving the impression it was trying its very hardest to be a Very Real Pub, in an Actual Place.
That night, I sat on the barstool in SFO with four extra dry ciders, a delayed redeye, and a book that was doing a terrible job of holding my attention. I’d bought it from the airport bookstore specifically because I liked the cover, even though they say that’s not how you’re supposed to buy books. It stood out among the fiction racks, a muted sunset swooping across its front, and overtop it declared itself THE DREAMERS1 in proud white type. It seemed like a nice sentiment for awaiting a delayed departure, the option to dream through someone else’s words. But they took me nowhere.
Every few paragraphs I’d flip it down on the bar counter, splayed on whichever page had lost my attention. And each time the book’s spine bent further into ruin, I drifted pleasantly into some new inconsequential thought. I wasn’t so tired of myself back then. I was at peace in my in-between.
At some point the man on the stool next to me, who up until then had done an admirable job of blending in with the wooden panels, felt that my inactivity was an invitation to offer conversation that I felt too uncomfortable to refuse. His name was Tom. Or maybe Mike, but the ciders had made me cloudy, and truly I did not care. He was flying somewhere I don’t remember, and he was a perfectly fine choice for the last stranger I would shake cash-grimy hands with, before it all happened.
Or I guess I should say, before it all stopped, and nothing happened.
*
When there’s a real snowstorm, not that soggy Amsterdam slush but the kind like back in New England that even armies of plows quit on, the buzz starts a few days beforehand. First, the weather people speculate its severity. Forecasting 3 to 6 inches is nothing; 5 to 8 might close some things down, but when the map starts to turn dark purple, that’s when the news anchors get going. “Turn up the heat, folks. It’s looking like a big freeze out there!” Then the shops start to empty: firewood and bottled water are the first to go, then booze.
Exactly three days after my late flight’s return from California, the media alarm started:
Pneumonia from unknown source on the rise
First confirmed cases in Europe
And even though the virologists had been predicting such a hit for years, it was another two weeks before the shelves stood bare. But this time when the storm came, the firewood stayed put. Yeast, on the other hand, wouldn’t return to stock for months. The headlines didn’t seem to stop either:
Experts warn: stay indoors
Work from home is the new norm
When the escalating dystopia of the news started to feel like a virus in itself, I piled up all the things I owned that might entertain me in this new world: a meager tower of craft supplies and impulse-bought novels. I caught sight again of the sunset cover of The Dreamers. I recalled the calm familiarity of drinking in that airport, the normalcy of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger and the comforting feeling of wishing he’d stop talking to me. Now, with the world shuttered all around, I opened up the book again, and this time, many weeks later, if only because there was quite literally nothing else to do, I found the plot.
It goes like this: A mysterious sickness spreads through a town, a virus that brings an extended sleep. The infected are moved to slumber in rows of hospital beds. For months they remain oblivious to the chaos unfolding around them. Some of the townspeople panic. They unload their doomsday preparations and pull out the gas masks, but no one is immune. Other residents continue living; they know this too shall pass, but they don’t yet realize all it will take before it does: they keep their weddings, they hold their funerals, they hug. “This is how the sickness travels best,” the author writes, “through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.”
That night I dreamt of holding my breath while stepping into the warmth of infectious sunrays, and I woke to the otherworldly solitude of 6 days at home.
*
After a while in that new era, time stopped fitting into measures of days or months and became more suited to things like dishwasher cycles, tubes of toothpaste, or eggs left in the carton. And that’s when I began the extensive period of what I fondly remember as “Rotation.” I couldn’t tell you how many months it went on but it was at least four toothpastes. My time wasn’t time, my days were not days. I existed simply in a persistent rotation of the soft places in my apartment: from chair to couch to bed to carpet and back again, watching only the continuum of blank white walls that I still hadn’t decorated, save for half a dusty shoeprint in the corner by the door where a spider tried to come at me once.
Sometimes during Rotation, chance would land me on the yoga mat and I’d stand and forward-fold myself in half, and start focusing on my breath like they say you should, and thinking about how great it feels to breathe and how strange it is that this is what existence is, and I could almost start to believe for a little while that if I breathed correctly enough I could probably forward-fold so far into myself that I’d fall out of this blank room and stay folded and dangling somewhere else entirely, suspended in a nothing-place, like the space between the ticks of a clock or the sliding of the Netflix button toward the next episode.
*
What might have been a hundred and fifty tubes of toothpaste into the whole deal, the April snowstorm was in full swing. I stepped across my threshold with the bags of food and applauded myself for surviving the 18-minute journey from home to groceries and back again. The snow shook to the floor and melted on my nose, but I was too busy feeling the relief of accomplished tribulation to wipe it away.
I began climbing the dark stairwell. Halfway up I cursed myself, as I always do, for the false confidence to make it to the top without turning on the light; tripping over my feet on steep Amsterdam stairs at this point seemed to be a fundamental character trait. They say you’re supposed to learn to love yourself for who you are but lately I’d been wondering if my efforts would be better spent instead training my fingers to reach for the dang lightswitch.
In the dark I considered why I ignored the man who called out to me on the footbridge. It was only there, already in self-deprecation on the landing, that I realized I dropped my mushrooms and he was only trying to help. Hopefully he enjoyed the free shiitake.
I dropped the bags on the kitchen counter and started to shuck off my dripping layers, leaving everything in a heap on the tiled floor. In the bedroom, I scrounged for my fluffiest leggings and the sweater that was so big I could drown in it. The bed stood right there, and, perhaps a consequence of the habit of Rotation, without entirely realizing what I had done, I discovered I lay motionless and diagonal across it, looking up out the window at the sky. The April storm had picked up, ferociously. I watched the snow drop to the ground, over and over, falling too quickly to focus on any single flake.
Today I am watching it snow, said my brain. It was an obvious thought but the strength of its arrival surprised me. Like a quote or a lyric stuck in my head, it repeated.
Today I am watching it snow.
Today I am watching it snow.
It wasn’t a discomforting sentiment for the occasion, I guess, but the more it repeated, the more wrongness I noticed. There was an unnatural break: “Today I am – watching it snow.” Like a bad movie dub, or a frankenthought showing the seam of its sources. The first part started confidently: Today I am! But instead of a smooth singsong into the second half, the timbre fell instantly down into quiet resolution. As if watching it snow was inconsequential, not the direct object of the only predicate repeating in my head.
Unable to escape the sentence in my mind, still horizontal and purposeless on the bed, between the fall of one flake and the next, I realized what was missing. This thought was not of my own mind but from a distant past. I unpeeled the hazy layers of memories-almost-forgotten and finally found it, an idea from someone else’s story2. I haven’t read it in years, but I still remember it, nearly line by line. It begins in winter: “Today I am drinking instant coffee and Pet milk, and watching it snow,” an old man tells us. He shares his view of the outside, the smoky clouds swirling around the sky, and the flurries falling through them. How he watches as the wisps bend around the flakes, how the clouds collide and combine and rise as one into a thicker covering above.
The author remembers watching swirling collisions like this through his life: how poured cream would break into his grandmother’s black coffee, how a waiter layered concoctions into tiny liqueur glasses, how it feels to start missing someone who’s still sitting right there. Each a moment of alchemy, two entities yielding their whole essence to the force of becoming something new. And within this force, an impermanence, the singularity of collision: when two things are not yet united, but when cream can never again be separate from coffee.
I’ve spent many years with this story within me. The boy I loved once sent it to me, after a long silence. “I read this and had a thought of you,” he wrote, and I didn’t ask which one. Looking up at my own snowy pandemic sky above, it struck me that maybe he saw something of me in the old man’s winter: stood frozen and always still as I was. Or equally likely the bitterness in the sludgy coffee. Perhaps he knew that around him I always felt like the waiter’s glass: see-through, small, full of poison and possibility.
But, if I’m honest with myself, I know it’s that he felt both consumed within and entirely gone from me since the first day we met. For every street we walked on and table we sat across, in every song we danced to and silence we settled in, I was halfway somewhere else. He recognized in me the vacancy of a person consumed with a nothing-place, fixated on the impossibility of holding onto everything that has already started to end. If I’d ever truly found that limbo, the ability to freeze us, I would have stayed paused in the moment of our surrender for eternity, examining all the ways he and I collided.
On the last morning of our short time together, all those many years ago, he and I sat in an airport awaiting separate flights. I kept my eyes on the ashtray that sat in shining contrast to the faded table of an overpriced pub between the C & D gates, the only place that served beer at 5 in the morning. I watched the lines in the wood, worn from years of dragged plates and pints, as we tried to hide our misery.
When our time was up, I remember I said nothing and I did not move. If I’d known better how to exist, I might have said to him, “I have spent 100 days watching every cell within me bend and one by one orient to you. I have conceded my whole essence to what we have become and what now will end.” Instead I watched him tip his hat to me as he walked away. Eventually I turned around to find my own gate, empty and useless. We left each other just a couple corners away from where we first met, by the transfer desks at Heathrow Airport. So I guess, in a way I’ll never understand, something about me has always felt right to departure terminals, too.
*
That other night in that other airport, on the barstool before the endless nothingness, was almost 800 days ago, and on this bed watching that snow, I found I felt no altered from the person I had been while waiting for that redeye. Nearly 800 days of spinning around this limbo and colliding with nothing but those blank, empty walls. Nearly 800 days and every cell in me felt the same. The world had been closed for as long as my memory could see. Nothing, absolutely nothing has happened. In all our efforts to keep ourselves alive, look at all that we lost – all the channels of friendship and fondness and love. Purgatory indeed.
Still diagonal across the bed, the blobs out the window continued to speed toward the ground. This snowing Dutch sky was so unlike the sky of the old man’s story. His swirled and bloomed in crashes of clouds and wind and flurries and life. He saw in it all of the things that made him human: the starts and stops, and the beginning that marks every end. He saw the alchemy, and knew it not just as the tragedy of finality but as the magic of creation.
But this sky above me was nothing like that. It was exactly like it so often is here: simply, utterly grey. Fucking bleak. The flakes – now united into angry popcorn lumps – seemed to emerge from sheer nothingness, and fall away again into black. No spots of a thicker cloud layer, no spaces between or remnant hints of the bits beyond. Just a whole blanket of mundanity to cover everything forever and all eternity, like it hadn’t moved in months; none of us had.
It’s no wonder the Dutch don’t want to BE here. They were raised under this hollow sheet of sky, never learning the lessons of what it means to matter. Even the wind can’t bear to be here: er staat wind, they say. There stands wind. It can pose itself in the concept of wind, but can never have the chance to whip itself through a young girl’s hair or knock a watering can onto a flowerbed or tip over a hundred-year-old tree.
I examined the blank snowy spring sky a while longer. In one moment I thought it might have almost started to swirl but it turned out to just be the electricity in my eyes. Little pebbles crinkling across my sight, the kind that disappear the moment you try to focus on one, and you can’t be sure they were ever really there.
I realized I’d been there unmoving for too long. I brushed the hair away from my face just to reassure any peering neighbors that I hadn’t died diagonally across the bed. But I overshot and whacked the radiator instead. The pain of impact pulled me from my daze.
I stood up from the bed, with all the audacity of a snowstorm in April, and slumped back to the kitchen to unpack the groceries I left to melt on the counter. Just after the eggs went into the fridge, as I rotated toward the couch, a tiny sliver of something opened through the cloud. Not quite light, not quite a clear sky, not anything that swirled, but something. And finally I recognized what had long eluded me, through all the soft places and blank walls and the endless television of my own memories: the best part of this storm is that it will end.
JP 