Necessary Journeys . A Haircut. Naked people.

                                                                     Necessity.

Last week I set out out on a Necessary Journey, to Amsterdam. Yes, I was needed, but I will not  lie to you dear readers, I was glad glad glad of the necessity.  The sense of being herded, detained in my own home for weeks on end ( home's your castle) by other parties was doing something to my mind's peace...my maybe soul.  Grinning guards at check points when I had to travel, queues cattle-like at supermarkets, I accepted, with its  consequential cortisol spikes, helplessness...(the curve the curve).  The news, the newsfeeds arguing the toss, disputing fatalities.  The helpless old in nursing homes.  Collective Guilt. Mea culpa mea culpa.

I accepted it, all.

And now the oh so reluctant opening up (dance of the seven veils) complete with doom laden warnings to the restless, squeals of refusal from the people thoroughly spooked and BLOODY WELL NEVER COMING OUT AGAIN, PERIOD!

And science as news, as newsfeed, as irrefutable, with its contradicting, blaming, framing messages:

There will there won't be: second waves, antibodies, cures.
There is there isn't: alleviation in hydroxychloroquine, remdesiver, masks.
Locking down, or kind of not, has it hasn't  saved the people, flattened the curve.
But facial Masks are useful, useless, helpful, pointless to prevent your spreading, but not breathing in, a virus...
droplets, droplets travel many metres, wait to ambush, hoover, hang, athough they don't... they may... they are...dissolved... they are too fine for masks to stop them... not, they're not!
Just wear the masks? Yes, wear them anyway. Ok?

Me, I took positions on this virus, like you do. I got behind the immune system coping, the right to prudent autonomy,  that kind of thing.  Behind questioning everything  spinning from the panicked government, irrefutable scientists, news, the newsfeed.  I wasn't scared, or any more than I am always scared of life's incalculable shifts and endings.

But then, days were weeks and weeks were months of lockdown.  Fear comes to you anyway.  Hysteria, a kind of madness flying out from all the shifting narratives, sticks.  Even as you try to hold your ground, sustain your people. The point comes where you can't sustain this flight from normal, or say the words ( flattening curves, in it together, stay safe stay safe) ( you never said the words). You must resume your everyday, or spiral into some basically unhinged.

                                                              A Haircut.

And so I walked from  Centraal Station into the enlightened city of Amsterdam,  blinking at bodily proximities of 1.5 mts, fumbling for masks for trams, and breathing, breathing mouthfuls of lung expanding air. Walking, walking as you do in cities always, taking in the city vistas,  its canals and buildings visible anew in the absence of the tourists.  Only the locals out and shopping, walking, talking in their native tongue, the strong stretched vowels prevailing in the soft warm air.
I listen, soothed, on my way to have my hair cut on my second day.  I had a sense that I would be renewed, made good again in the sanctum of the salon,  the snip snip of the stylist's  scissiors. Accumulations, dead ends from the lockdown falling from me as the stylist layered and washed and combed my Irish hair.

And so it was. I walked back up from Prinsengracht,  crossing the Kalverstraat to Dam Square so  free and fine and easy, light as air.  I felt my head sit lighter on my shoulders,  cleaner, sane.


                                            You pay your money and you take your chances...

Days pass, and we grow accustomed to the freedoms here, the restrictions too that have become the price of freedoms. Coffee in a cafe, dinners out, apologetic waiters limiting numbers, murmured reminders of social distance as we the Grateful Customers smile assent. The people walk together in the public spaces easily, reminded of the virus by shop assistants, waiters wanting so to have you in.  Observe the rules...oh yes, oh yes, but nonetheless entice you...in.   Come in, come in, oh careful does it; this way, do come in.


                                                                  Nudists,

The angel child and I take the train to Zanvoort aan  Zee, on Friday. The Zee the Zee, I say, it's been forever dearest (corralled in midland locked-down Ireland)  since we've been and seen the sea!
It is divine, is all. The sun shines kindly, warms our pallid Irish skin, the breeze blows back our new cut hair, the sand gives gently to bare feet, we walk the shoreline, talk, the two of us, content. We turn at midday, cross the sand for coffee, walking through the people sun bathing. I pay them little mind.
"So um, why are they all, I mean, ah, naked?"
Huh?
The dear girl's face is creased with distaste at a solitary naked man stretched careless on a towel. Full frontal, to be clear. There are a few of these guys, as well as little groups of men and women comfortably naked, unbothered in their skin. We agree we must be on the nudist stretch, and to get our coffee back the way.  And she, the dear girl, asks me as we hasten ( she more disturbed than I) if I would, I mean myself,  be into that, because she most definitely would not.  I say I think I would (among congenial people). I say I think, after the initial awkwardness I'd be ok with it. She definitely wouldn’t be.  I cannot say I blame her really, observing the ever so slightly predatory solitary man. The fleeting facial smirk, the calculating eye. But ah, the little laughing groups!

I talk about about my naked dreams over coffee. (We’ve done her dreaming on the walk) Dreams of the recurring kind where you are shoeless, barefoot, sometimes naked, in the public space. Where you are OUT, too late to dress, go back, or find your shoes... your clothes.   Self conscious, feeling foolish, solitary, shamed and naked in a public place. We ponder on it, poke at it,  consider exhibitionism, shame, or boundaries, appropriateness, grounded ness. Thefeartheshame. Recurrence, and what it is that I'm (just) not getting here, why doomed to dream the dream over and over.

We shift to Normal People which she is re-reading after the TV show. It turns out to be, basically, related, we decide.  Connell and Marianne and intimacy in bodies, minds, the heart. Baring body baring heart. The desire for it... fear of it. (And still the public discomfort  about...naked need?)

I wonder later if in fact the dream discomfort’s with vulnerability, openness.  Not leaky boundaries, sagging gates, between public and private, as I had loosely guessed.  Not a dream of jeopardy, abandonment of lock downed, closed off, safety ( we hysterically require)   The feartheshame neurosis.  Not that at all.  I wonder if in fact being naked, honest/open with all others is the last frontier?  Connection, laying bare the body/heart. The feartheshame neurosis.   Being able for it, being willing, to try. 

Where do you go to (my Lovely).

                                                                   Unmoored

 "So, we'll all break for coffee...ah... will we,"  the hostess says self consciously  "...and we'll all I mean go down to our kitchens now, from wherever you are, in your (chuckle) socks, and, you know, make yourself a cup of coffee, or tea even, make tea, and come back...from wherever you are in the house in your...your PJs"  She chortles at her own insouciance, trials off...
And I'm pushing up from the desk in the box room, the play room that was, shelves still holding children's books, splashy children's paintings. I am disorientated in place and time, yanked from aural connection via tele conference, and in need of strong coffee.
'Wherever you are in the house' 'our kitchens??'  Oh.  The words erase my inner visual of colleagues  in a room around a table, besuited, a secretarial station humming just down the hall.  Like I know I'm in my socks in my boxroom, but they were at work where my mind had placed them. Picture perfect, arranged,  never disturbing me with visual cues or body language. My captive audience. Not.  And I'm shocked into body, pins and needles, real.
I need an infusion of coffee. (not tea).

                                                                    Stunned

I offer that palliative to my younger daughter, passing her room, her open door, where she is a pale silent presence hunched over a desk. She looks up and through me, failing to connect.  She's online at a lecture, the lecturer's voice grown familiar to me over weeks, catching stray words, dutch accents, intoning on physics, micro-macro duality, vectors and whatnot.
She beats a path every day of this lockdown from kitchen to garden to bedroom, listening, writing, staring at a screen.  Connecting for lectures sometimes in the early morning, sometimes in late evening. The Dutch are always ahead of us. Or behind us... They're down with an early start, anyhoo.
"But, so,  I mean... what about dinner... the hoovering... your washing? (spilling untended from the washing machine) I variously ask, forgetting that she is not really here, in my house. She's in a lecture. She's not really there either.

Days she has a stunned look, like a bird smacking hard on a windowpane.  Times she grows wild and rowdy on zoom calls, only wanting to connect, hysterical in the emptiness of virtual presence.
The Garden is taking shape under her restless fingers, strawberries forming, tomatoes, lettuce tips peeping from the raised bed. She grows the vegetables, leaves the flowers, the grass cutting to me.
She is a lover, a hugger, a dancer with dancers, given pacifiers of virtual meets, netflix, lectures online. Tossed back and forth from virtual interior to empty exterior, each and every day.  Sometimes suspended in the transition. Lost.

All night she dreamzs,  creates... astonishing astonished scenarios to locate herself, somehow, in this bizarre and total up -turning of her everyday life.
Dreamzs. She dreamzs, and in her dreaming leaves her lockdown, travels far and wide and seeking.

                                                                   Barbarian

I stand and stare at the kettle thinking this, and remember the other one, the sister.  In virtual college too, bedroom door closed, desk neat, pencils lined, computer placed, content I think you might say.  Her papers submitted in a timely fashion, her grades looking good, at ease with this slowing down of every day tumult, worldly invasions.  At ease at the wheel that lockdown has placed in her appreciative hands. I wonder if Beauty in her tower, Rapunzel and Sleeping were just as OK with it, were humming and upbeat in the cool quiet space created by bricked walls, lockdowns.
She comes down, steps out, slips away periodically to meet her BF, her lovely boyfriend, quarantined
in similar rooms, waiting.

Evenings she comes down from the mountain, sits with us. Knitting, headbands, scarves, a shoulder bag, her needles weaving blues and greens and reds, her eyes fixed on the TV screen as she dissects narrative arcs on box sets, Game of Thrones rehashes, Normal People.  Scherezade distracting us.... 

I wonder how the hell she'll ever go back to clamour, non verbal communications, the great unwashed humanity.  If she ever has to.  I expect she can do it, she's done it before, (if she ever has to...)
I roar, invasive, from the kitchen  "Hey, d'u want a cup of Coffee! Hey?  Hello?... Answer me when I'm talking (shouting) to you!"
I am the Barbarian (at the gates)

                                                                Dreaming

I'm spooning Lavazza into a jug when a phone call comes in, from the boy, in the moment as you might say.
I ask him how he's going, how he's spending his days. He has refused to come home, preferring the pandemic payment, rent assist, long days fishing, long nights talking with mates on his xbox, his snapchat, his facebook page.  Unwilling to give all that up. DOH! Unable to see any down side,  I suppose ...
"yeah, good, yeah, I mean weathers good? I'm, like, fishing, on the river all day... in the evening I yeah, talk to the lads on the xbox?" he offers me.  "Right".
A silence... "So, the days are like melding? one into the next? in a dream, like, a daze?..." he says
slowly.  Hmm.

He is a poet, a baulker, a bird you toss strategically, tenderly, from the nest. As I had done a while back, watching keenly from back here on the nest's rim as he got on top of routine, got into having to  work every single solitary day even summer, got his head around paying for things. Which he managed, pretty well.
Until now. When he doesn't have to manage anything at all. Uncongenial, I mean.
We talk some about his (maybe) Masters, his (kinda of) notion to do an MA in the Autumn. About getting going at it, taking steps, that sort of thing.

I mean I talk, and he (half) listens...



                                                             I Will be your Virus.

He tells me how he won't come home, start yet, infect me maybe...maybe? baby!, I think, truly, you've got nothing I've not given you? and maybe I won't call you out on that (just yet) ( I'll wait) (timing's everything) Yeah. 


In the kitchen the Caged Bird has taken over making the coffee, and Beauty has the cups.
I catch them eye rolling as I say goodbye to the Boy, remind him to switch off the Xbox occasionally, eat Good Stuff, wear Sun Block, come Home (occasionally)


                                                                 Enmeshed.




Somehow we've slipped back in time, in years. I have put on the halter of Mammy and they the mantle of adolescence, as though leaving home, growing up, flying solo had never happened at all... has to happen all over again.

Sometimes I slip into my car on my own and drive. For foodstuffs, or medical supplies or, I mean
essential business. The car is my Oyster, my Chariot to Nowhere, my own crazy headspace. My own.

And just when you're thinking you're getting away with it a txt flashes in on your screen which you decide not to read and you read...
"where u? in town? u nvr sed!!!
You stare at the screen.
And another
"We'd hve likd 2 go 2? get out of here 2!!!"
And another
"U nvr sed?"
I am barbarous...keepy...viral... I am.

Sometimes I wish I didn't know so much about them. I wish that they didn't know so much about me either...


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