Going Nowhere, Moving Forward
By Nasia Anam
March 12, 2020, was a strange day. It was the last day before spring break at University of Nevada, Reno. Something in the air had shifted. Things felt somehow different that morning. Scarier. News was being reported with more alarm. Store shelves had begun to empty. The virus was here. The virus was everywhere. I sat in a midday committee meeting, anxiously swiveling in a chair at the long boardroom table. My fellow professors chit chatted in hushed tones before we started. “What do you think is going to happen? Are they closing the university?” “I don’t know,” I answered before I sneezed. Oh no. Allergies? Spring pollen? The cherry blossoms were blooming, after all. I felt panicked and grabbed a tissue from the box at the middle of the table. I peered over at my colleague sitting the next seat over. “I’m sorry. Should we sit further apart?” She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I’m not a religious person but I mean, look at this thing. Look at the states where it’s spreading. It’s only affecting old people. Kids aren’t getting sick. I mean…you know?” I didn’t know. I had no idea what to think except that I was worried and frightened—for me, for my family, for everyone.
My students had their midterm in the afternoon. When I walked in the classroom, they were all seated around the perimeter, spaced far apart from each other. “Are we social distancing?” I asked them. Was I joking? I didn’t know. They said no, they were spacing themselves out for the exam. A couple of them asked if I thought we’d be coming back after spring break. “I have no idea,” I said. “The university hasn’t told us anything. But I hope not.” They pulled out their blue books, and I handed out their exam sheets. They asked a couple questions about directions for the exam sections, and then they all fell into a silent, intense concentration. The air was thick with nerves. They scribbled. They fidgeted. They shook their legs, tapped their pencils, flipped through their textbooks and notes (it was an open book exam) with a degree of urgency that was likely about more than the test. As they finished up and turned in their work, I whispered to each one of them with a smile, “Have a good break!” I’m not sure why I said it. I knew nobody was going to have a good spring break.
As soon as the last student left the room, I pulled out my phone and began to walk towards my car. I called my sister. I was supposed to get on a plane in a few hours to take a red eye to Chicago. We were throwing my dad an 80th birthday party that Saturday. It seemed like a terrible idea now. “What should we do?” I asked her as soon as she picked up. “Let’s cancel. Half the people invited are in their seventies. It’s not safe. What are you going to do? Are you still coming?” I told her I would fly home to be with my family either way. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but I feel like if I don’t come now, I don’t know when I’ll be able to see any of you again.” Every decision I made that day, big and small alike, felt enormously consequential. As I made my way home, horrific questions began to circle in my head. What if my dad gets sick? What if he’s already sick and he doesn’t know it? What if I get sick on the plane? What if I make my dad sick? What if my dad dies because I made him sick?
Back at my apartment I fretted about packing. How much stuff should I bring? Which clothes? What books? How long would I be there? Probably more than the week I had initially planned. It was still wintery in Chicago. Should I bring my down jacket? Should I bring t-shirts? I pulled clothes haphazardly from my closet, plucked some books at random from my shelves, and stuffed all of it into a larger suitcase than I had anticipated packing. I left for the airport hoping it was all enough.
It wasn’t. I ended up staying with my father in the suburbs of Chicago for five months. I had not spent that many consecutive months in Illinois since 2005. I had not lived in my childhood home for that long since high school. I conducted the rest of the semester online, playing professor at the same desk where I had studied for my SATs. There were moments in those first few months when I started to doubt the last 20 years had even happened. I had this strange feeling that my entire adulthood, all that had occurred between age 18 and 38, had been some kind of dream. At other moments I felt only worry and fear as the outside world began to look like a more and more dangerous place. So much death. So much violence. So much rage. So much change.
And yet inside my dad’s house, which I only left for walks around my old neighborhood, my life bore an uncanny resemblance to the one I had as a child. Inside my dad’s house, it felt like I was back to living in the late 20th century—before the global pandemic, before the unrest of the last few years, before becoming a professor, or going to graduate school, or college, before any loves entered or exited, before my mother died, before 9/11, before Y2K. The sameness and stillness of those days inside my father’s house made no sense, since the world outside seemed to be transforming so fast. I wondered if I would even be able to recognize it when this pandemic ends. If it ends.
I thought a lot about the year 2000—the last year I had lived at home before leaving for college—as the shelter-in-place days bled into each other. The idea of 2000 was hallowed when I was growing up. The new millennium! Y2K! The future! And in the years leading up to it, all that excitement contaminated by the anxiety and dread that something awful would happen when the ball dropped on December 31. That our computers would explode, that the electric grids would fail, that the world would end. Were we wrong? Maybe it’s just taking longer than we thought it would. Nothing happened as 1999 turned into 2000. The world kept going. Though my mother was concerned enough to prevent me from leaving the house that night to be with friends and party like Prince had always told us to. I was on lockdown. It was prophetic. I went to bed before midnight in protest. My mother shook me awake at 11:45 pm and told me to come downstairs and put on my coat. We stood out on the deck in the freezing winter air and watched the fireworks show our town had put on just a few miles away. She handed me a Ferrero Rocher and said, “Happy Millennium.”
I begrudgingly admit that I am a millennial, though just barely. I’m at the upper limits of that maligned generational group. I’m a millennial because my childhood was analogue, and my adulthood is digital. I’m a millennial because I can’t stop scrolling through Instagram. I’m a millennial because I have a side part and wear skinny jeans. Because I do enjoy avocado toast. Because I did download a massive number of mp3s on Napster. Because my first social media account was a 2003 Friendster page. I’m a millennial because the world I live in as an adult looks nothing like the one I was promised as a child. I’m a millennial because I was in college during the same years as Mark Zuckerberg (before he quit). Because I watched Facebook and Twitter transform from a dorky way to “poke” friends and stalk crushes into the technological juggernauts that have ushered us into an era in which fake news, conspiracy theories, violent divisiveness, terrifying extremism, and damaging misinformation reign. Adolescent millennials didn’t see technology fail and the world end on January 1, 2000. But young adult millennials created the platforms through which that prophecy seems perilously close to being fulfilled some two decades later.
The new millennium and its children may see an earthly era come to its apocalyptic end. Or not. The world hasn’t ended yet, anyway, though we are all worse for the wear. Many, many of us haven’t made it through the past year. Many of us have lost loved ones. Many of us are suffering financial, psychological, and physical effects that will last many years beyond this awful one. At the beginning of the semester in January 2020, when none of us could have imagined a global pandemic or the millions of lives it would extinguish, I asked my students to read The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. “What do you think?” I asked them. Are we at the end of a 2000-year cycle? Is the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem? Are things falling apart? Can the center hold? My students pondered the world they were born into, with its endangered environment, ceaseless wars, social unrest, and political turmoil. “It seems like he could have written this now,” one of them mused, referring to Yeats. But he wrote it a hundred years ago, I responded. He wrote it just after the end of the Great War as the 1918 influenza pandemic was raging—a disease to which he had nearly lost his wife. It was a terrible period in history. You can see why he was thinking that end times were nigh.
As the semester ended in the spring, I asked my class—now spectrally through the internet, all of us quarantined into little squares on a screen—to read Yeats’s poem again, this time in conjunction with Franny Choi’s 2019 poem, “The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On.” They took solace reading the two together. I did too. On this side of the past year, in March 2021, we have been through something that has felt apocalyptic. We are still going through it. But things look different than they did a year ago. We have learned to live amongst the rubble. We hang on to fraying threads of hope. We keep going. There are treatments. There are vaccines. There are plans in place. My family is safe. I am safe. There is a future we can glimpse glowing in the horizon. It is far, but we can see it. We continue to move towards it. It is like Choi’s poem says:
By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.
Photo/Nasia Anam.
Nasia Anam is an Assistant Professor of English and Global Anglophone Literature at University of Nevada, Reno. Her research and teaching focuses on literary representations of space, movement, and migration between Britain, France, South Asia, North Africa, and the United States in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Her writing has appeared in Interventions, ASAP/Journal, The Journal of Narrative Theory, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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