In the middle of a pandemic, in the Trump administration, in one of the poorest cities in America, my house burned down.
I lost coats and cumin and baby pictures and couches and graters. I lost sheets and earrings and paintings, nail clippers and dining chairs, computers and bundt pans. I lost books and towels and platters. I lost rugs and vases and tumblers, frozen sausage and bottles of wine. I lost olive oil and shampoo. I lost whole milk. I lost wool blankets, t-shirts, sesame oil. I lost a desk, credit cards, floor lamps and flour. I lost pens and sheet masks and mattresses. I lost passports, I lost nightstands, I lost a television. I lost notebooks, a mop, and pillowcases. I lost dressers and corkscrews, mayonnaise and bowls. I lost sweaters and magazines, keys and pillows. I lost turmeric, picture hangers, and a dustpan. I lost orange juice, I lost underwear. I lost a couch, and jeans. I lost coat hangers. I lost a colander, eye shadow, toothbrushes. I lost bras. I lost cutting boards. I lost jam, and jackets, and night lights. I lost a toaster, champagne flutes, sheets. I lost coffee mugs, camisoles, a rice maker. I lost conditioner, a bookshelf, popcorn. I lost an end table, crackers, aspirin, curtains. I lost a bath rug, vinegar, skirts. I lost photographs, cushions, and a parka. I lost capers, socks, paperweights, plates, a dining room table, floor lamps, and a hammer. I lost batteries, sugar, speakers, cardigans. I lost eggs. I lost a laundry basket. I lost raisins. I lost necklaces. I lost sauté pans. I lost a radio, bread, mascara. I lost curtain rods.
I had no place to sleep, so I checked into hotels, airbnbs, motels. I kept moving, about every five days. Exurban suite motels were good, but COVID meant there was no housekeeping, so I would move from one to another. A promising looking Airbnb had the thinnest mattress, and my back was hurting. After having spent four months in in my house, which was now empty and blackened, I spent those driftless post-fire days hours driving around Cleveland, a city that had been even further hollowed out: the roads were empty, the sidewalks barren, the stores ghosted.
Everything was missing.
At check-in at the Sonesta Suites I told the woman at registration my house had burned down. “Oh my god! How horrible! My friend’s house burned down. She says it created a clear before and after in her life.” She drew a hard line through the air with their arms. “A clear before and after.” At a convenience store, explaining my far-away, lost expression to the check-out clerk, I apologize, said I was kind of out of it because my house had just burned down. “Yeah, same thing happened to my brother. He said it created a clear before and after in his life.” He raised his arm and sliced down through the air.
Apparently I was in some middle, between past and future, a slice down through air.
But I was just dazed, and annoyed that I had to do a bunch of errands. COVID had given me sweet, sweet freedom from errands. I adored that about the disease. But now I was in errand boot camp: Buy underwear. Find a place to live. Cancel utilities. Set up a new computer. Buy pants. If there was some after headed my way, my view of it was blocked by relentless, prosaic urgency.
I bought a bed. I bought a couch. I bought a table. I bought cumin, a coffeemaker, a roasting pan. I bought milk, pillowcases, soap. I bought t-shirts. I bought pajamas. I bought shoes. I bought a colander, a laundry basket, pants. I bought a desk, napkins, ketchup. I bought a chair. I bought a lamp. I bought books. I bought pepper, a vase, olive oil, a dress, pens, mugs, nails, lotion. I bought a nightstand. I bought a broom, glasses, underwear, a ladle. I bought soup. I bought sweaters. I bought bras, and butter, a tablecloth, a skirt. I bought a computer. I bought an extension cord. I bought towels. I bought rice, socks, dishwashing detergent. I bought knives. I bought pillows. I bought pepper, a jacket, garbage bags, blankets. I bought rice. I bought toothpaste, I bought a phone. I bought nail clippers. I bought a new kettle and a new comb. I bought a spatula. I bought a garbage can.
Buying cumin did not prove transformative.
A month later I was in a new place with new stuff. I had fewer errands. “Let the after come!” I said to the view outside my new apartment. I wanted to see the other side of the air that people kept slicing.
But nothing felt like an after. Truth be told, nothing felt like a before, either. I remained me, COVID was still raging, Trump was still president. The present, a purgatory, was just a long succession of days. I sat at my computer. I ate cereal. I watched Netflix.
This must be depression, I thought. Everyone told me this was a really big deal, losing all my worldly possessions! Or maybe I am just desperately damaged, so far gone that my environs are irrelevant.
Why wasn’t I more devastated? Where was my after? What was before?
I decided I needed therapy.
Masked, across the room., I yell at a woman; “I am worried that it I am not upset enough about my house burning down.”
She thought I was coming to her to deal with the trauma of the fire. “Wait, you are upset that you are not upset? Sounds to me like you are incredibly resilient!”
Why is resilience such an ennobled virtue these days? Maybe we should be raising our kids to be pretanaturally melancholy. That seems a proper response to this mortal coil, not my anondyne response. Why is it admirable that, when a home turns to ash, it mainly means annoyance at spending a lot of time in strip malls?
Then again, why did I want to be damaged, endlessly grieving, consumed by loss? To have physical proof that once I lived heavily, and when that substance transformed into ashes it took me as well?
After all, we had all been thrust out of our befores, back in March, four months before my house fire. In the intervening months, I had lost even more: the coffee shop where I chatted with the baristas, the bar where I had happy hour old fashioneds. Can you miss something you had already lost? Can you miss again? Is there a Russian doll of missing, with my fire being the cute little one in the middle, my city encompassing it, economic failure hugging the city, Trump suffocating the economy, and functioning democracy the biggest matryoshka?
I had stopped missing going out to eat. I had stopped missing my favorite neighborhood bar. I had stopped missing getting my hair cut. I had stopped missing hugging friends. I had stopped missing travel. I had stopped missing. If this was, also, resilience, then make of me humpty dumpty, fallen, mournful.
Even before March, in 2019, in 1999, in 1989, in 1979, Cleveland had been missing. It is a city literally marked by what has been lost: emptied stores, vacated houses, potholed streets, idled factories. Loss is now the city’s cliche; “Cleveland” a synedoche for economic failure, cleaved in half by race. Even the synecdoche for the syncecdoche, the sports teams, stuck to the script. Once there were a million people walking these streets; now there are 330,000, all locked down.
Here, a house charred is unremarkable. Mine had been simple, 800 square feet cheaply built in the 1920s for the mill workers who lived in this neighborhood up the hill from where they used to make steel. It was not built to last.
I missed the fire, too. I had been out shopping. The first thing I did when I saw the charred remains of my bedroom spewed over the driveway on my house was walk away, to a boutique down the street. I bought clothes. I threw the ones I was wearing away.
Destroy my cabinets and I barely flinch. Burn my dresses; they made me look fat. Tell me I cannot go to the bar and I buy expensive bourbon for the house. Prohibit me from hanging out in crowds and I sigh with relief. Put a fascist in the White House and I soothe myself by opening up a savings account. Resilience!
“I live too lightly in my life,” I tell the therapist. I don’t even miss making plans. Thanksgiving? It’s fine. My son’s college graduation next spring? Eh. Who can even remember traveling? The rule of law? Will we get a new form of governance as easily as I got new towels? The king is dead, long live the king. The stuff burnt; long live stuff.
I live up high now, on the 10th floor, every room with a view of the lake. I stare out at the shore, the waves, the far-off freighters, the horizon. I overlook. I am light, tiny, amidst, stuffed inside, trying to remember what to miss.
