I heard on NPR (how most of my sentences start these days— is this what it means to be an adult?) that people are having more vivid dreams since quarantine started. Almost every night I remember what I dreamt and how I felt and often still feel it in my chest long after I wake up. But it’s not just dreams, it’s every time I close my eyes. I’ve always been a daydreamer, lying awake to fantasize about the future, dream up vacations, plan our next visit to see my dad in the desert or my mom in Japan, decide what delicious spot we should try next time we go to the beach, picture our forever home which I had always envisioned we’d be in this year... The first few weeks I was okay with putting my daydreams on hold, because that’s what all of life felt like— one giant pause button. Zoom was kind of funny. Neighborhood walks were nice. My husband and I could bond. When months kept passing but COVID cases kept rising there was the shift we all made into “the new normal.” Zoom was a chore. Walks in the neighborhood were an eerie reminder of what the world has become. There was a sense of mourning that this summer wasn’t going to be filled with road trips and backyard barbecues. Then there was a sense of mourning that this year wasn’t going to be the productive and milestone-filled year I imagined it would be back in January, a lifetime ago. Marathon? Cancelled. Career switch? Not possible. More “me time”? Yeah, right. And recently, I can’t make heads or tails out of the future so I find myself thinking about the past.
I’ve always been heavy on nostalgia, reaching for the scents, sounds, and sights of my past. Leave me in quarantine with days that bleed into months (I started this blog post in April and it is now almost August) and lying awake past 1AM even though I know full well that my daughter is going to be up by by 6 and I’m seeped in it as if it’s some homemade salve, protecting my skin from this unprecedented moment full of unseen pain, losses, and perpetual fear we all find ourselves in. When I close my eyes (or sometimes even when they’re open—glazed over from lack of sleep and too much/not enough caffeine) I travel back to specific places, places I haven’t thought about in years or, maybe, ever. I keep finding myself in the back of my grandparent’s closet in their home on Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills. In my memory it was reminiscent of the Lion and the Witch and the Wardrobe— small from the outside but spacious and full of wonder on the inside. I remember a window— but this could also be the small window above the built in dresser from my college days at Berkeley, an equally musty walk-in closet made of dark wood and plenty of clothes for dress up. In my grandparent’s closet I remember a life-size jewelry cabinet and a trunk full of vibrant scarves, hats and sashes. I remember the thrill of rifling through my grandmother’s things and the discoveries I’d make each time no matter how many times I entered her closet. I also remember she wasn’t really around. Busy with the restaurant perhaps? In the other room fixing up her own appearance?
I’ve also been finding myself in the tatami room at my grandparent’s house in Yamaguchi, Japan, in particular, the in-between space separating the room where I slept every summer ever since I could remember and the compact, outdoor garden where I spent little to no time in for reasons I don’t totally understand. This space had sliding glass doors to the garden on one side and shoji sliding doors on the other. And it was very muggy. The AC unit didn’t travel to this area and I was always in Japan during the hot, humid summers. But I remember sitting in this little nook feeling comforted by the sudden warmth, as I looked outside at the tiny garden. An occasional stray kitten would walk by searching for food. The cicadas would start to buzz. Time lingered here. Or it wasn’t a consideration at all. I just sat and be.
During these last few months I spend the majority of my time traveling from the kitchen to my daughter’s room and back multiple times a day. I spend another significant amount of time on the floor next to her crib while she falls asleep holding my hand and I stare at the ceiling. I hear the nightly 8pm cheer for the hospital workers. That’s when I know it’s probably safe to sneak out. While that is my daily life, in my dream life I keep finding myself in these places of my past. Places I had long forgotten or never really considered. My heart aches a little when I’m there. I think about my paternal grandmother and how the last time I spoke to her, I postponed a lunch date we were supposed to have at her new condo. She was about to embark on a new chapter in her life when a fall turned her into a vegetable. I think about my maternal grandfather and despite the fact that he was a shitty father to my mother, famously a pain in the ass to everyone around him, and addicted to both gambling and alcohol, I knew and felt his love. I’m sorry we were never able to communicate on a level beyond my elementary Japanese.
Perhaps these hours, weeks, months that just feel like one big groundhog’s day is the same as time suspended in the hot muggy air of Yamaguchi or the dark and dusty closet of Beverly Hills. I’ll look back at this time of my life where the days were long and feel nostalgic for our rent controlled apartment, its crumbling walls and cracked tiles, and windows that we crank open in the summer but can never get closed again. I’ll think about my little girl’s first steps tentative, then confident and barreling down the hallway a hundred times a day. I’ll think about the many iterations of our living room layout which accommodated our 20-something aspirational selves to our 30-something married life to our new parent life to our quarantined life. As a writer and artist, I’m addicted to finding narratives, themes, always trying to organize the moments of my life into a cohesive story that makes me feel like everything was meant to be this way after all. It keeps me out of regret and keeps me moving forward. As much as I am heavy on nostalgia, I’m heavy on optimism. But perhaps there is no rhyme or reason (can one make sense of a pandemic let alone parenting during a pandemic?), no dots to connect, just moments and spaces to be. As a perpetual dreamer I tend to think about all the things I could and should be doing, planning, preparing, contemplating. Part of it is me, but part of it is our Western culture of doing not being. Now that life’s rhythm is vastly different, these memories are reminders that being is enough, that visiting these quiet spaces from my past is a worthy trip in itself, that a closet for dress up, a view of a garden, and holding my daughter’s hand as she falls asleep are beautiful as is, they need no explanation.