Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on July 30, 2020.
My brain has been pretty well scrambled during these last few months.
I had trouble focusing on one thing for more than a few minutes without another thought interrupting. Mental disorganization, periods of heavy-headedness from trying to hold multiple thoughts at once, became part of the routine which took hold by late-March — the time when spring usually comes into shape.
Streaming hours of bingeable, mass consumption content, parachuting into any world that was not the world inside my head became my pattern. There was some level of stillness in not having to provide all the thoughts, all the narration.
These months — which should have been spring but did not have any of the feelings of spring — dragged on endlessly. They now seem like they flew by and have become a singular blur. A smudged memory of a moment in time when everything and nothing happened all at once.
At one point I wrote:
“Am I among the countless who have lost it? Lost any semblance of how life each day should be spent? My head hurts now. I feel like I’m getting headaches more than I ever have. Is it because I am not going anywhere? Not walking, not exercising? Too cooped up? Or I am looking at a screen for too many hours a day? Have I just got square eyes? Or does thinking now give me a headache because all the parts of my brain are in a state of panic and whenever I require deeper brain RAM than to think ‘I’m tired’ I overload the entire system? Or am I just thirsty? I have forgotten to drink enough water again.”
Time became a vague apparition once the natural rhythms of life went away. Late summer has crept up on many of us because rhythms dictate life and we’re still all out of rhythms.
We have no guideposts. Schools have seemingly been put on pause indefinitely, socializing remains generally prohibited, the office is closed for business, and, for millions, there is no work at all. Weekend and weekday have bled into one as there is no delineation between work and play since both ceased.
A year spent walking out of a strange New York City apartment and each time turning right to head south only to determine seconds later you are going north.
Finding a landmark with which I could orientate myself has been as difficult as filling in the gaps in my own eventless life. I wrote:
“Did I dream this? Did I watch this? Did this happen? Was that last week or last month? Why is my mind now placing me in a liquor store, near my college dorm? Was this during my sophomore or senior year? The large courtyard outside the liquor store. The cold case in the back past the cash registers where they keep the thirties and stacked up in a small spot twelve-packs of National Boh.”
How did I end up there? Memories that seemed fresh and also hazy. Moments from a time unrecognizable to now.
A memory from when I was a different person. Or is that memory a product of the person I am now? Am I seeing that moment as I had seen it then? Am I watching my own life in reruns from afar? Or is the memory invented entirely?
Clear moments but so out of context. Insignificant moments from a different life, but ones that frustrate me because there are no clear answers about them.
Another non sequitur in a series of non sequiturs.
The heat of summer is oppressive now and that is good because that is as it should be. One of the few familiarities of life that goes on undisturbed.
And last week, baseball came back. Another landmark from a life I remember living.
Opening Day, the one day in baseball which is meant to be different from all others. The time when we renew our love of the daily grind of ‘America’s pastime.’ A day spent thinking about hope for the season to come.
Opening Day, amid all of this, was a piece of the landscape I can use to reorientate myself to my surroundings, but the terrain still stays unfamiliar. Too much has changed since I last walked here.
Baseball played in the heat of summer, but without there having been a spring proceeding it this is a season started in the middle. Another vignette of life we have seemingly decided to enter halfway through.
Baseball began but there was no game to attend, there was no party to celebrate its beginning. Fans would not be allowed in stadiums for the entirety of the season. There was only a game. Baltimore took two of three from Boston and Miami did the same in Philadelphia.
By Monday — after it was evening, and it was morning, the start of the second series — the games for three of those teams stopped. Baseball was there and then was gone; a period when everything and nothing happened.
Two days later the games are back on for two of the four clubs left in limbo by life outside of baseball. The first game played in Baltimore of 2020 arrived on the last Wednesday of July. The Orioles lost to the Yankees, 9–3, on a night they were supposed to be playing the Marlins. A loss after a two-day trip to Miami during which they played no games.
Opening Day arrived, but Baltimore’s first baseman was not there. Privacy concerns prevented the manager from saying anything more elaborate than “He is not here today,” and “He is not available.”
Baseball offered a start and a pause and a departure. Details on all of this are sketchy. Rumor and chatter are rampant.
Opening Day and baseball’s return was nothing more than a reminder of moments from a once forgotten past. During a present, I still can’t fully understand.
A half-remembered memory; a glimpse of a moment from a life I used to live.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore.