by Faith Bugenhagen
Photography by Surya Sundararajan
There is a countdown clock on the The New York Times building, our generation’s save-the-date for when the climate catastrophe ends the world. Masks cloak our faces, ironic considering our generation’s need for validation based on our appearances. It’s as if the universe is serving us one colossal “fuck-you,” a kiss on the ass before it sends us all into our own versions of hell.
And yet, we prevail. We prevail by living every day as if none of this is occurring. We block out the bad with the good, maybe to a fault, but that’s up for debate. Is it distraction, or a desire to live radically while everything around us is crumbling towards death?
We live: by laughing, crying, loving, and hating. We meet for picnics and conferences and dates. We spend time with people despite dire restrictions to keep ourselves socially-distanced and safe. We normalize the new ways of living as if they have always been inherent to us.
It’s special how humans adapt. It’s been a sight to see these past, peculiar months. We’ve stood six feet apart, we’ve been touch-deprived and intimacy-starved. However, we’ve still dated, prioritizing feeling loved or desired in a time when those feelings may create a false sense of security.
“False sense of security,” a pessimistic phrase some would argue, but isn’t that what these emotional and/or sexual connections are? These relationships are tiny bits and pieces of hope that put us back together, reminding us that the world we live in is still inhabitable, that our lives can continue in spite of what the news feeds us. What reminds us, though, distracts us, and that’s where the negativity ensues.
Our stomachs are bottomless pits and our brains ache as we read articles telling us that we’re only living to die. Lapses in judgements and misunderstandings cloud our brains when they bear witness to an entire population of people who love each other. So we create a “consumable love” through manifestations of these fragmented situations that aren’t quite relationships, but rather “situation-ships.”
Situation-ships: the in-between of casually dating or being friends versus actually being together in a relationship. Girlfriends, boyfriends, significant others: this is what we are now trying to avoid. We’ve constructed the idea that materializing commitment and embracing a relationship will become the largest inhibitor to our existences.
We lie in beds in spaces that aren’t our own, without any right to do so. We spend hours of time, each and every day, with each other, without actually ever being anything to each other. Is it because we have experienced such colossal disaster in every aspect of our lives that we are now actually birthing it?
I’m not arguing that being both intimate and unattached to someone doesn’t work. In a perfect world, it could. But we don’t live in a utopia. We are not a happy, healthy population of individuals living today. We survive but we don’t thrive. How could we possibly tackle being cool, distant, and unfeeling?
That is what our world wants us to be. Unempathetic. It is a dog-eat-dog experience that comes at our expense. To be unemotional means to be adaptable in this world.
In reality, we are creating our own escape routes through microdoses of love and intimacy; we have rewritten what it is to experience these things. There is no inherent issue with this “in-between” we facilitate. However, we must remember that we are human... not devoid of emotion, or a desire to be truly and radically loved.
Create and construct your own situation-ship to how you see fit, because we are all trying to keep our heads above water, swimming through the days. But wanting to communicate, to have more, to be selfish for a moment and desire greater fulfillment, will return us to regularity. It will remind us of our humanity.
