Maybe It’s War, Dušo
My mother-in-law says this is World War III. That’s not coming from a conspiracy theorist, but from a woman who lived through Yugoslavia’s civil war in the ’90s and watched the first NATO bombs falling here from her balcony.
She’s the kind of woman who went out and got vaccinated as soon as she could; who casts her vote during local elections in a process that many consider a charade. In other words, she’s not just some skeptic who will write off anything and everything as the government’s dirty work.
My husband, on the other hand, seldom agrees with his mother — he doesn’t bother to cast his empty vote and will resist the vaccine for as long as possible — yet I think, implicitly, this might be one exception where they see eye to eye. He stood beside her and watched those bombs falling once; he told me this reminds him of war, too.
He said that to me casually one day, when Serbia’s first curfew began: the streets were almost empty, as were certain shelves in the stores, and in some parts of the city, they had deployed heavily armed security forces (for what, fuck knows, to enforce the curfew probably, or at least send us a message, though we liked to joke how they would shoot the virus away).
Soon we saw one of the main fairgrounds in the capital converted into an emergency hospital lined with rows of cots and gray blankets.
I remember staring at a picture of it in the news and thinking it may as well have been from WWII, not 2020. Not World War III.
In about a month, the entire country would shut down. The borders would close; planes would stop flying. Non-citizens like me were warned to get out or get settled, because we weren’t going anywhere.
It was a state of emergency and walking the streets at undesignated times suddenly became a crime. Most of that is behind us now, but day-to-day life still feels far from normal to me, even within the walls of my own home and the confines of my own head…
If this is war, it rages on still.
While the hostile stalemate between America and the USSR was a Cold War, I consider this a Lonely War. It’s a war we’re all enlisted in, only we aren’t fighting in troops, we’re enduring it one by one. It isn’t one to be fought in the trenches or out on the battlefield, nor even from the sky or some clandestine office where drones are controlled.
Most of us are fighting right in our own homes. Although, I’d hardly call it fighting — it feels more like prison. After all, that’s what it is, isn’t it? Politicians and the media gave it tactful names like “stay-at-home orders,” “curfew,” and “shelter in place,” but in the end it’s akin to house arrest.
They even have us all in uniform — when you consider the masks which are now as essential to leaving the house as your set of keys. Masks that muffle our voices and conceal our expressions, which reminds me a great deal of the way soldiers are stripped of their individual identities in boot camp.
And that’s not to mention how some societies are segregated by vaccination — literally, in physical spaces, and financially, because people are barred from coming to work, fired from work, or withheld from financial progression if they do not agree to take it.
That’s not to mention people living in countries that aren’t afforded access to vaccines, or perhaps the “right” vaccines, and then strange new mutations develop there and so we effectively ban their entire nation. You know what kind of countries I’m talking about.
This analogy seems like a slippery slope to conspiracy theory, but I’m simply expressing how it feels. And it feels a lot like war.
Like many modern wars, it’s hard to see this one happening, but not because it’s shrouded in secrecy — to the contrary, it’s in plain sight, interwoven with our day-to-day life to the extent that we’ve begun to embrace it as normal. We’ve been told this is the “new normal.”
And I think that’s why I still feel trapped here in my home, here in my head, even with the worst behind us (how I hope the worst is behind us). We’re told that we can live our lives again with the small and selfless price of injecting a vaccine, but your jab won’t make me feel like myself again because this war isn’t on the streets anymore — I feel it most inside my head.
The whole world is inside my head now; it’s been shrinking, not just the physical world outside, which is constricted by curfews and covid passes, but also my window into that world, which is to say, the internet.
It feels like I saw more of the world these past two years through a digital screen than I have with my own eyes. My reality is on that computer screen, which means it’s made of nothing more than light and pixels, which means it’s not reality anymore, it’s a mirage. It feels like living in that metaphorical forest where a tree falls but no one is around to hear it; trees are falling, falling, but nobody is there — nobody is here — so are they falling, really?
We’ve all heard about a special kind of torture where prisoners are locked inside a room and forced to listen to the same song over and over and over again. I don’t know if that method really exists or not, but it’s the best way to describe how I feel nowadays. Only, instead of a song, it’s my own thoughts: every day the same frustrations, the same pep talk, the same false hope, and the same resolution to try better tomorrow…
It’s not really the same though, it’s shifting; I can sense my mind unraveling. My inner dialogue pulls a 180 from noon to night, until I can hear myself arguing in my own head, with the nasty and self-deprecating thoughts getting louder by the day while the courageous ones dwindle — until I lose my train of thought completely and I’m left hugging myself in bed not knowing what to do next, because nothing makes me feel better anymore.
Maybe I’m just weak; maybe I’m depressed or deranged. Or, maybe it’s trauma. Maybe it’s torture. If the pandemic isn’t my oppressor, then it’s the cruelty of my own mind which happens to be thriving under these conditions. But, isn’t that what psychological torture does — manipulate your mind in a way where it mistreats itself?
I realize that in a Covid war the true frontlines are in the hospitals, where the real warriors are doctors and nurses. I realize my mental instability isn’t the real peril, but a new virus scientists are still trying to understand; I realize the true victims are sick and dying.
But, there are many reports of depression and suicide skyrocketing since the start of the pandemic, and I suspect this is the toll many of us will be left living with, even after masks and curfews and covid passes become relics of a historic event. The only thing I can think to compare that to is shell shock, with all due respect to the people who actually live with the real thing.
And I realize by most accounts this is not a war at all, but a global health crisis. “War” implies that somebody started it, that it’s somebody’s will, somebody’s wish — and none of us would like to think that it is.
Though, in a twisted sort of way, it would be comforting to know it’s all under someone’s control.
In a twisted sort of way, it would be empowering if this was war — because then, dušo, my darling, we could fight it.
