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This Is Us
What’s Keeping Me Going Is You
Isolation has made me realize how vital human connections are
This month I was to have celebrated an occasion I’ve been looking forward to for 25 years: a return trip to the city of Rethymnou, on the island of Crete, where, in April of 1995, I was stabbed in the throat. A dozen of my best friends had agreed to join me there for a week in observance of my Silver Stabbiversary, culminating in a ceremonial street procession and ritual reenactment. My friend Aaron had even done some research into stage knives (important fact: they do not retract 100% of the time). But the ambitious Cretan Expedition had to be cancelled, along with everything else, because of the pandemic. Even before the trip became impossible, it was starting to seem like an unnecessary risk for what was, in the end, a pretty frivolous purpose: after all, the whole point of the trip was to celebrate not being dead.
The stabbiversary is a private occasion, of no significance to anyone who doesn’t take a personal interest in my survival. I bring it up now only because we’re all currently getting to experience something similar — and I don’t just mean the memento mori offered us by this pandemic, but the existential trial imposed by our collective quarantine.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that I was depressed when I left for Greece in February of 1995. My father had died three years earlier, and I was not processing my grief, as they say, in the healthiest ways. I was drinking an alarming amount, having frequent blackouts, driving drunk. I was in my mid-verging-on-late-twenties, still adrift, with no clear idea of what I was or should be. My girlfriend of three years had just broken up with me. My ostensible mission in the Greek islands was to search for the final home of a writer I’d admired, a diabetic who’d drunk himself to death in that idyllic setting — again, in retrospect, not a project that augured well for my own emotional health. This last February found me at a similar impasse: my mother in decline, broken up with my girlfriend of three years (apparently my personal relationship limit), and no idea, or much enthusiasm, for a next book. And suffice it to say substances had once again become something of an issue. It was another of those moments when, absent any external…
