Writing in quarantine
Trying to make sense of a story without an ending
The night after the Twin Towers fell in New York City I rented Woody Allen’s Manhattan from Vulcan Video in Austin, Texas. I watched it with a Cypriot woman who’d never been to Manhattan. I was born there. For some reason it felt like the right thing to do.
We needed to watch normal people doing normal things we all took for granted 10 hours ago. To see the city skyline the way it was supposed to be, preserved now only in grainy, black-and-white Panavision celluloid.
More than any of that, we needed to see people getting through their shit and back to the business of living once the clouds had cleared.
Being comforted by Allen’s film made sense that night.
Manhattan, the movie, had an ending. Manhattan, the city, post 9/11, didn’t. Stories without endings are scary because they leave us in limbo and anxious.
Closure. You’ve heard of it. It’s cliché but a fact. Our brains need to put the pieces back together at the end, even if all the pieces aren’t there.
I would never have dared write about the Twin Towers or what it felt like to live in the aftermath of their ruin. It would have been like stumbling into the Rothko Chapel in Houston loud and drunk.
Words just seemed sacrilegious at the time. Too much air had gotten sucked out of the room.
When I started to think about the idea of writing in quarantine this morning, the first thing I wrote was that, after five days of it, it already felt like another old movie: Groundhog Day.
That’s the one where Bill Murray plays an asshole big city weatherman who wakes up every morning on the same day in early February in a small town called Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, until he learns to live the day right.
Living the day right, in Murray’s case, meant learning to be a better person. His stint in Punxsutawney, a divine glitch, was a punishment. Which in Hollywood is a lot less murky than anything Woody Allen was trying to say in Manhattan. Groundhog Day is a feel-good movie.
But the fact is, I was dead wrong. Writing in quarantine isn’t like Groundhog Day: waking up every morning and repeating the same day in a made-up town we can’t wait to get out of.
Writing in quarantine is waking up every morning to a different script without an end in sight, as the furniture of the lives we took for granted is stripped to the bone. The people we see. The food we eat. The air we breathe.
Writing in quarantine is scary.
But it’s also putting us face to face with how we live and the choices we made to get there.
To say that’s a punishment can’t be right.
Which is why I chose to write today, and why I couldn’t write about target audiences, SEO or story techniques.
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It’s why I’m here instead, not thinking about writing at all, but about the unpolluted city air, the mortuary quiet, and the creepiness of pedestrians in surgical masks, and about how everyone we know and love is at home tonight like us thinking about the same things in the dark.
