what was 2021?
The place was New York City, the neighborhood was Crown Heights. The runs were around Prospect Park and past the bandshell, where Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine had woven Lucile Clifton lines into fence with grosgrain ribbon. The ribbon was pink and orange and yellow. The lines were COME CELEBRATE WITH ME THAT EVERYDAY SOMETHING HAS TRIED TO KILL ME AND FAILED. The masks were worn outside until they weren’t.
The red-tailed hawks were circling and so were we, on circuits of wing and foot. The planes were northward and low over the Park. Travel was back, though the prospect of it suspect. The flights were packed, the passengers difficult, the airports crammed and sterile.
The protest was a riot, the riot was a siege. The dress code was patriot paintball. The rioters were “knuckleheads,” were “mobsters,” were “fucking retarded.” The spectacle was deadly and stupid. The rhetoric was off the cuff and incoherent. The senator was drunk, or seemed to be. The whole thing was embarrassing. The old president was autocratic and childlike and then he was gone. But the damage was lasting, the damage was done.
The end was not the end. The pandemic was past tense but present. The words for marking time were unavailable or unhelpful, were approximate and vibey, premature and befuddled. Pre-Covid was so inaccessible as to be unreal, Covid was lockdown, post-Covid was Covid. Delta was Covid. Omicron was Covid. The past was the before times. The future was a dark joke.
The war was coming to an end, the people were clinging to the plane, were falling from the sky. The end was inglorious but the war was much worse. The war was a fabrication and then a failure. The drone strikes were ruinous, the “war of precision” imprecise. The pundits were losing their minds at the optics of defeat, at the prospect of an end to body counts and offensives and air raids.
The year was reshuffled and misplaced, impossible to describe. 2020 was undermourned and misremembered, 2021 its interminable aftermath. 2020 was full of long, strange dreams and 2021 was devoid of them. Photographs and memories were mislabeled, or seemed to be. My habit of taking videos and photos was gone, as if no longer necessary.
The beach was full of friends and strangers, was hot and clogged and technicolored. The talk was to each other but seemed to turn instantly to vapor and heat. The world was satisfying, the world was on fire, the world was covered in polyester and sand. The daiquiris were delicious and quick to drink. The airplanes were dragging large banners along the coastlines. The polaroids were small and blown-out. The company was crucial, the mood celebratory but imperative. We were making a point to do things, to have done them, to have done them together. What we actually did was unimportant.
The nights out were long and hedonistic. The concerts were many and long-awaited. The weeknights were full, the moods wary but exuberant, the thought of another lockdown driving urgency, celebration, release. The joy was real, it really was, if it was also always guarded or shaded with disbelief.
The apartment was new, the bicycle was new, the City somewhat larger for it. The City new too, in that dull and daily way it reassembles itself. The sidewalks were still pocked with black half-dollars of chewing gum, the trash bags still stirring with rats. The people were walking around each other on the sidewalk, the cars were loud and menacing from the streets. The C train was always late, or seemed to be.
The cat was dead on the road to the beach. The towel was yellow, the cup was blue, the sand was everywhere. The year was a lazy list of adjectives and omens. Life was looked for in detail and texture, in futile attempts to escape the metanarratives, the discourse, the news, the opinions. The explanations were unhelpful, the prophecies all grim and coming true.
The new president was garbled and preposterous, the senators old and corrupted. The boat was Almost Heaven. The man was from West Virginia. The legislation was doomed. The man said they’ll have to push me wherever they want me. The push wasn’t nearly hard enough.
The ruin was fire, was water and wind and snow. The wildfires were out west but their smoke eastward and thick. The basements were flooded, the cars swamped, the warehouses wrecked, the forests torched, the rivers swollen, the storms avengingly strong. Disaster is eternal but these were freakish. The temperatures were unprecedented. Canada was 121 degrees. The tornadoes were in December. The tornadoes were in Connecticut. The jet stream was collapsing, the ice shelves, the power grid of Texas. The planet was smoldering and the wealthy were promising Mars, the moon, the metaverse.
The Becherovka is in a leakproof bottle now. Our actions, like our lists, are small parodies of control. I pull a card and it is the Five of Cups. I had hoped for something different. On the riverbed, three of the cups are overturned and spilling. Never to be set right.
ben tapeworm