Lately, I’ve been trying to locate the things for which I am thankful, even in the midst of what is arguably one of the most uncertain moments of my lifetime. The past six months have felt blurred somehow, as though the haze of this pandemic has permeated nearly everything we do; the spaces we inhabit, the people we surround ourselves with, the parts of the world within which we seek refuge. It has felt impossible not to fixate on the enormity of it; the manifold ways in which it can encumber us.
This year I learned what it is to feel bereft — of the singular familiarity which comes with having an attachment to another place. I spend each summer in India. My mother’s family is from Kashmir and the kingdom of my childhood was built out of the time I spent there, the relationship I had to the mountains, to my grandparents, to the wayward smile that is the Kashmir Valley. I took for granted that I would always have an automatic pathway to this place; that it would always be available to me. While it’s true that most things which are inaccessible right now will feel reachable again — elsewhere-homes, the comfort of what came before, this elusive feeling of “normal,” — I’m not entirely sure how to look beyond this moment, however impermanent it might be.
My grandmother passed away in July. It is disorienting to grieve someone without the assistance of that which can be felt or held or understood. It is stranger still to know that something has shifted in the makeup of your universe but to be unable to encounter it directly. I’ve been trying to process it, but like so much else right now, this too feels halted somehow – like something will be retrieved from it later.
I want to take something away from this time. When we look back, weeks or months or years from now – I’d like to know that I extracted from it what I could, however fictive or insignificant it might feel. There are so many grievances: the frustrations which accompany online learning, the distance from friends and family, the palpable uncertainty which seems to govern us now, the suspension of everything which is important to us as students. It seems that we are reliant on these worlds we’ve created for ourselves online, and while they might remind us, yet again, of the interactions and experiences we’ve been deprived of, maybe they can teach us to be grateful for what remains in place, still.
I’m imagining that maybe something of my grandmother has nestled into the trees and is revealing itself in these all-over, imprecise declarations of autumn. That sometime soon, I might find myself again among those mountains which raised me. Until then, I am trying to cling to what I have, to remember that my world is intact and whole and still-moving, that the seasons are changing in their routine ways, that there is so much we can recover, so much which can be renewed.
