Published December 9, 2023

For brevity’s sake, I chose the term “straight days of remote status” as shorthand for several things. It means “consecutive days of mostly being inside my tiny apartment. Consecutive days of living in a pandemic. No office to go to. The absence of daily interaction with people in the flesh. Consistent and necessary precautions to keep myself from harm.

And so much more.

This building dates to 1927 and, I’m told, was once a hotel. It reminds me of a dormitory, with a main entrance and lobby, and access to the units is through inside hallways. In those hallways and other common areas, there is no ventilation. The place has its charms, but this story is not about them. In some ways, it is about feeling like a prisoner at home.

The struggle is surreal

This story was all but impossible to write, even with 999 days of lead time — and certainly impossible to write well. These 1,000 days have done a number on me and who I was before them. They have derailed almost every plan I had for myself. Trying to describe them, now that I am typing with intention on my keyboard, is beyond my reach. It’s like, as a friend once said, trying to stack greased BBs underwater wearing boxing gloves.

I have watched and listened and felt and absorbed how my social skills have atrophied because of the loss of daily or almost daily in-person conversations with friends, co-workers, acquaintances and strangers.

(Already I want to stop writing because it feels like many of my bad dreams, with me inside a moving vehicle that I have no control over, and I’m almost entirely passenger and in almost no way driver. Take me where you will, narrative, then open the door and kick me out.)

Somewhere in my head, there’s a list of all of what has gone wrong since March 13, 2020. I’d told myself not to draw it out and put it here because we all have our lists. No good ever comes from a suffering and hardship competition, or even the perception of one, so let’s take it as read that we have all felt substantial loss of so many things and people.

(I’m putting this down for now. I can’t focus for 10 consecutive seconds, much less write.)

And now, a few hours later, it is still a thousand days, and trying to write this feels like walking through woods at night to try to find the way home.

Beaten down by what is passing for life

Nothing in my experience before March 2020 prepared me for everything since. I’d lived nearly 900 days after coming out as a transgender woman, and I had fresh goals. Now, most of them are gone or unrealistic at best.

I’ve now lived more days as a trans woman in isolation than I did out and about in the world. It’s not lost on me that in more ways than one that might be the reason I’m still alive. But I am so tired. Not long ago I had a phrase for what the past thousand days have done to my mind, but that phrase escapes me now. And perhaps that’s all you need to know to get the point.

Physically, I feel beaten down by what has passed for living but has been a poor substitute. Survival became my only goal early in the pandemic. If I’d known I’d still be alive 1,000 days later, I’d have come up with a plan that looked beyond survival. We seem to have mostly given up, so how many more days of this await me? Is it true that the best time for a plan would have been March 13, 2020, but the second-best time is now?

Let me wrap this up. I have no idea where I’m going with this, which is an apt description of my daily existence. I keep trying to squint my way to a glimpse of the future, but there is only fog in this thousand-yard stare of a thousand days. And between me and whatever is on the other side of this is the rubble of what might have been. I don’t know what to do with it except try to step around it.

Do I even have another thousand days left? Not, I think, if the decline of mind and body stay on the pace of the previous thousand. There are no regrets of the type that make a person bitter, because when all is said and done, my vulnerabilities recommended isolating and hoping for survival — and something worth it all on the other side.

Some days I go somewhere else in my mind. Some days I have help with that, and that help accompanies me to my editing job. On the most crushingly familiar of those days, when it feels like it could be any of hundreds that came before it, you might find me in some unmade movie in a scene with piano music and quiet conversation that reveals the denouement. Maybe I’ll be looking out at the snow, barely aware that I am a character in search of a plot.