Accounting
by Joanne Lozar Glenn
[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]
It was maybe April, maybe May, when I decided to inventory what I had bought, what I had felt compelled to buy, what I had sought and been unable to find, and all the hazards collecting like lint on scrim since lockdown began.
Even in single-spaced 8-point font the list spanned two screens. Alcohol and aloe vera gel. Shop towels, rubber bands, pipe cleaners. A thermometer battery, a pulse oximeter. Bags and bags of groceries. A hand-powered clothes-washing agitator and Dr. Bronner’s liquid castile. Skoy cloths, hair cutting shears. Sponges, dishwashing soap, utility gloves. Neosporin, after googling how to decide if a head gash merited stitches. Mine did not, so I learned how to make a butterfly bandage using strands of my own hair.
What I couldn’t buy, what I tired of longing for, I lived without. A working dishwasher. My own backyard. A hug. A shared meal. The peace that settles over the apartment when the neighbors are away and the bathroom pipes free of their incessant rushing water. A loved one to come home to after a long walk.
One year in, I wonder if I am becoming a caricature of myself, if parts of me will become so exaggerated I’ll find it difficult to gather again, if and when it becomes safe. It’s one thing to embrace my weirdness—picking salt off pretzels and eating it before the pretzel itself, arranging books by how they stack on shelves, loving how a clean, dry sink free of dishes shines in the afternoon sun. Wiping it down after every rinse, just to have that one small daily pleasure.
It’s quite another to cluck my tongue as I talk back to media pundits, ruminate aloud on the merits of donating this jacket or that dress to Goodwill and how will I get it there anyway, or curse the mask-less runner whose breath I feel on my ear as she passes me from behind—then tear up at every nuance of grace in this pandemic that has stripped so much from so many.
The struggle is not the doing without or the getting through. The struggle is the fight against feeling it, a fight I should want to lose. To feel is to admit the broke-openness of accepting we will all suffer unevenly. Of seeing, then softening to this same weirdness, this same longing, this same loneliness that exists in all of us. Of reconciling who I used to be with who I am now, with who, maybe, I still could be.
Joanne Lozar Glenn is a freelance writer, editor, educator, and writing retreat leader (wtwpwn.com) whose work has been published in Beautiful Things (River Teeth), Peregrine, Under the Gum Tree, Ayris, The Northern Virginia Review, Brevity, and other print and online journals. Her most recent book, co-authored with five other writers, is Memoir Your Way: Tell Your Story Through Writing, Recipes, Quilts, Graphic Novels, and More (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Accounting”? This piece was born in a prompt-writing group. We’ve been meeting monthly for two hours on Zoom since April 2020. The leader keeps a numbered list of random words, someone in the group picks a number, and that’s the word we use to trigger our first 15-minute writing session. I guess the offhand comment someone made about it being a year since we had last met in person lingered, and as I flashed on some of the things that had happened during that year, I began writing about trying to make a list of what I’d bought since everything shut down. The prompt for the second 15-minute writing session kept me in the same “channel,” moving toward that idea of becoming a caricature of myself. Maybe it’s because now so much of our lives is on screens and so there’s never a sense of being fully “embodied” when meeting with others. Or maybe it’s because of COVID forcing us to see each other as threats, that our very breath could be lethal to one another. Afterwards, the ending of what I’d drafted kept nagging me, so I poked at it some more. Originally, I thought the hard thing was accepting the virus’ indiscriminate destruction and our initial powerlessness over it. Then I realized that the more I tried protecting myself from the continuing trauma, the more I risked becoming numb and losing my empathy. And oh btw, the prompts were “course” and “tire.” Proving once again, as a wise writer (I wish I could remember who) said recently, it doesn’t matter where you start your writing; it matters that you start.
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