I had to lie down last week.

The weather shifted today in Atlanta, starting somewhere around 40F and going all the way up to 80F, a swing so sudden that it was upsetting, causing headaches and sneezing. I had the familiar nausea of change that happened too fast, and then found myself outside the house at the end of a day of work blinking at the clear blue sky and warmth where a cold overcast wind had cut through me just twelve hours before. I felt like I had been thrown into a new environment suddenly, like I went to work and came out into a different city. In some ways I had; the governor signed a genocidal sort of thing against trans kids, the prosecutors in downtown courtrooms insisted going to a concert made some other kids domestic terrorists, and everything suddenly seemed dangerous in ways it hadn’t before.

I’m having problems adjusting to the new reality reflected by the laws and cases happening around me, and along with the ongoing external turmoil, my own grief for life before the quarantine comes in waves. I had gotten back into the habit of blogging weekly for six months, and then the third anniversary of the quarantine shut down came, along with a rain of bad news both personal and political. I couldn’t write last week. I could barely move after work some days. I had to stand with my back against a wall, as per therapist instructions, and try to breathe and stretch and exercise my way out of the inner tempest. I walked as much as I could, tearing up the backs of my heels as I have yet to regrow the calluses lost over the 1,095 days since the world turned upside down. I still cry too easily. The calluses will only grow back with time.

The income tax refund came in this week, so I took the youngest to sign up for much-needed braces, a victory in parenting. We’re all slowly catching up on health care we’ve been missing, first because of quarantine, and then because of the finances. The oldest was able to pick out a second pair of prescription glasses, a backup pair that will make us all less anxious. I’ll be going to the optometrist myself for my first pair of bifocals on Friday, and I scheduled some preventative health care for next month. I tried to take both cats into the vet, but our five-year-old orange tom caught wind a day early, and took off, the first runner he’s ever done. We have posters up, and he’s chipped, so we’re hopeful he’ll come back.

The youngest is bereft, crying that this is the worst week of her life, as she was told she has at least two years of orthodontia ahead of her and her cat went missing. I often wonder about the perspective the teens in the house have had about what we’ve all been through the last three years, but they’re a notoriously difficult to talk to demographic. I wonder what they’ll say to me in a decade’s time about 2020, the year of school at home, and 2021, the year we struggled to get back on track, and then 2022, the year we lost the house. I have joked - and in front of them sometimes - that I went through quarantine with two girls at the meanest ages, 6th and 8th grade. I can’t write about what it’s been like for the kids though, because I’m not them. I lived with them, but that’s not the same thing as having the same experience. I haven’t been a teen for thirty years, and their world is so different I admit I haven’t a clue as to their feeling on anything. I wasn’t a teen in a world where everything could shift so radically in a day or a week that what was safe and true when you woke up could be illegal or outlawed by the time you went to bed.

Of course the domestic terrorism and anti-trans movements here in Atlanta have been rolling towards us for a while. But it’s still a shock that these things just keep happening. I want to write more about my own work, but I can’t, because it’s not safe anymore to talk about any sort of activist work, or to even say public service work is activism. I debated last week the merits of deleting twenty years of personal blogging because who I am and what I do is ever more contentious. I have a library degree. That used to be something that guaranteed fairly secure, safe work.

I didn’t delete the twenty years of blogs - the wayback machine would hang me anyway, if someone wanted to make my personal life an issue by way of a professional attack. But the idea of the laws in Florida, the ones that mean librarians can be sued personally, along with all the pointless censorship, were in part what laid me out for a week.

I can live through this. I lived through the last three years. I want to talk to my kids, in a decade or two, about what they felt and thought about what’s happening in Atlanta, both inside and outside our home life. I want to know what they think about everything. I want them to talk to me with their straightened teeth about how they felt when (hopefully) the cat came home. I want to know what the girls are like in ten or twenty years when the calluses on my heels and emotions have grown back. And after the adults I have raised tell me their truth about growing up through the quarantine and fascist governorships, maybe we’ll sneak over the Chattahoochee and piss on Newt Gingrich’s grave together in the dark. These hateful old men can’t live forever, and my daughters are young and strong. At least, that’s what I tell myself every day now, with my back against the wall, as I focus on breathing.