This Will All Be Over Soon

by Cecily Strong

  I also watched all the early dating shows, which were always fascinating because no matter what the theme or rules of the show were, and no matter where the show was being filmed, they always ended up in a hot tub. I don’t know where these places exist. I’ve never been to a club with a private hot tub room in the back. Did they film at a hotel? ElimiDATE was one of my favorites because they traveled to different cities throughout America and I enjoyed watching some of the worst people with different American regional accents. I remember one guy with a thick Wisconsin accent saying one of his favorite things to do was throw sticks in the street to hear the cars drive over them. He said it more than once.

  During my audition, which I worry is too short now that I’m here on this stage, I think I hear some laughing. It’s surprising and hopefully good news, as I was told they never laugh. Then I go back to a little room until they tell me it’s time to go. It’s late and I head back to the small hotel room, not sure what to do with myself. I feel like a zombie. What in the hell just happened? What am I supposed to be feeling? How am I supposed to feel normal in any way? I have forgotten my phone charger of course, so I can’t call anyone after, trying to conserve the battery. I go to the airport early that morning and buy a cheap new charger.

  When I get back to Chicago, my friend Susannah picks me up. She’s driving us back home and I’m trying to tell her everything I can remember and I see I have an email from an SNL producer. They want me to fly back to New York to meet with “people” in the offices. Susannah and I freak out. My mom freaks out. My dad freaks out.

  I fly back within the week. I go to 30 Rock and sit in the office of one of the producers, Lindsay Shookus. I talk to her. John Mulaney comes in and I talk to him. I talk to Steve Higgins. I’m hoping I seem cool and collected and charming and funny and all the things I’m definitely not at this moment. I have explosive energy in me. After I’m sent back to the hotel, I’m ready to go out!

  I contact my friend Graham, from Chicago, who now lives in New York. We took an improv class together and became fast friends. My good friend Mackenzie from college is also in New York. I ask both of them to come hang out.

  And my little cousin Owen sends me a message. I haven’t seen him in years! He’s talking to me like we are old friends. He’s around if I want to hang out. And I smile. Of course I want to hang out with Owen who I haven’t seen in years! Why not? I’m on a roll!

  Owen and Graham meet me at a Mexican restaurant and we have margaritas. I think Owen and Graham split dinner, treating me. Then we head to a private karaoke room Graham likes and we meet with Mackenzie. I keep checking in with Owen. Is he having fun? Does he like me? Does he like my friends? Does he want to go to the next place? He’s grinning, walking along excitedly with us. We are all excited!

  We get to karaoke. Graham and I sing some Fiona Apple. I do “Case of the Ex” by Mya. Then all of a sudden, I see Shaggy come up. Owen says, “Oh, this is me.” Graham, Mackenzie, and I laugh hard at Owen being the quieter one, watching us, and finally deciding it’s time to do his thing. And his thing happens to be Shaggy.

  And he’s got this fucking song down. Practiced! Rehearsed! He’s so good!

  We all cheer for him and he says he loves doing Shaggy at karaoke. I like my cousin. He’s fun. My friends like him. We walk back to my hotel that night, Owen and Graham making sure I get there safe, and we all laugh as I’m screaming nonsense because I’m so happy.

  Owen stuck around the whole night.

  April 22, 2020

  I speak with a young girl from work named Remi. She’s new. I have never really spoken with her. My friend Erin puts us in contact thinking maybe I can help.

  Her mom is in the ICU in LA. She’s terrified. She doesn’t know what to do. She knows only what the doctors have said. She only knows her mom can’t get the Ebola drug; she can’t get the other drug until her TB test results come back, and everything is backed up. Remi can’t be there with her. She doesn’t know what COVID is or does. It was so fast. It feels like everyone is being forced to learn a new language in seventy-two hours. I talk to her. I tell her anything I can remember that calmed me down when Jack was so sick with this unpredictable and totally unknown illness and I was terrified. I am so sorry for this girl, for the hours she will spending wondering if she will lose her mom. And I want to be able to help.

  I say, “Maybe I’m a better writer during a time when everyone is devastated. I’m a great voice of devastation. It wouldn’t shock me.” We laugh.

  But then I think more. I haven’t been able to write about Owen until now. I still don’t quite know why, but I have some ideas. I didn’t want to get it wrong. I didn’t want to feel self-indulgent with my loss. I didn’t want to claim it as my loss when so many others were hurting. Where would I share my writing? Instagram? And then there’s this thought that I never wanted to share him if it wasn’t in a way where I was also sharing love. Or I never wanted to make someone else sad. Because that is not how to share Owen. So maybe now that it seems everyone is scared and unsure and the world is upside down, I’m finally able to write about him. Because everyone is already going through something. So I’m just another voice.

  April 24, 2020

  Last night, Kevin and Matt and I were eating another one of the dinners I’d made. I’m always on a damn diet and now it seems a little bit silly. I love pasta. I love cooking. I love red wine. We ordered six more bottles of this one we like from the local wine store that delivers. They are really good at social distancing, we comment.

  April 27, 2020

  I don’t know what week we are on anymore. Feels silly to keep track.

  I just read a heartbreaking post by Alexis Morley. She lost her boyfriend, award-winning songwriter Adam Schlesinger, to COVID earlier this month. She explains waiting for his fever to break and making jokes through text when he went to the hospital. And then the unthinkable happened.

  I text Jack: I’m really really grateful you recovered.

  As I slip slowly into some kind of routine in this new normal, I am shaken by how much we say “when this is all over” because it hits me each time that the farther we get from the first week of March, the less I think this will all be over.

  I just checked my phone to see if it was May yet.

  And while I’m a part of that group of people who stay in a lot, and so some of this doesn’t bother me as much as others, I am devastated when I think of what I miss. Walking to work. My wonderful doormen Les, Mervin, Mario, Javier, and John—and the dog treats they keep up front with them to give to Lucy and the other pups in my building after walks. My trips to Los Angeles with Lucy on the plane with me. Dance parties. Going out to eat with friends.

  We used to go to a Mexican restaurant all the time called Tacuba. They have great sautéed spicy kale. And spicy margaritas. We went for my birthday one year. They put flowers in my drink. My friend Mackenzie went to the bathroom as we were leaving and she had toilet paper on her shoe and I pointed it out as a fake “bullying” joke in the front of the restaurant but then we were all suddenly really laughing so hard, the staff too, with Mackenzie in the middle laughing so hard she was crying. Rashida wore heels that night, as she’d been starting to dress up more lately, and by the end of the night she could barely walk, but then my friend Shawn switched shoes with her. I have pictures and video of Shawn and Rashida walking next to each other wearing each other’s shoes.

  Jack and I met up one night at the Time Warner building to try to get a late dinner, although everything was closing early. I felt so embarrassed that I’d made him come uptown to a bunch of closed restaurants. They said they were open online! We finally got one place to serve us and we both were so overly thankful to the gruff waiter, who wasn’t happy to be serving us. We joked afterward that it was so over-the-top of both of us that it was almost like we were trying to take him home.

  I started going to an Italian restaurant near my apartment. I met up with Owen and Leda and Rashida for dinner there once. I was
late, of course, and Owen was standing outside. “Hey, cuz.” We hugged and then he gently said, “I think there was some kind of issue with the reservation maybe?” I checked my phone and realized I somehow totally fucked up everything I could have making a reservation: wrong date, wrong time, wrong number of people. “They said they are going to figure out how to get us in, though.” And they did. And they gave us fried zucchini on the house.

  I met Jack at a bar outside my work once. We were supposed to get a quick drink but we wound up staying there much longer because we were having fun and flirting and sitting next to each other on stools, so sort of touching legs every now and then between giggles about nothing, and every now and then I would dare to look him in the eyes, which is hard for me. And then he came to my work with me and let me do my favorite thing of showing my favorite videos of sketches on the server there. I liked that night.

  I miss all the things I never thought I’d have to miss.

  And I wonder if that’s what’s going to all be over soon.

  But I do as I do every day, and I let the thought go.

  April 28, 2020

  Everything in the world seems so chaotic and random right now, but because of this space, I keep feeling as if suddenly my own life is not as random but is full of all these connections and coincidences. I don’t mean to say I believe in fate. I just mean I’ve always felt like the chaotic one trying to figure out how to fit into the world around me. Now in this isolation, it seems like the world is disjointed and figuring itself out, and I’m the one with some type of order, waiting on the world to find its axis again.

  I made a video this week playing Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer for the latest SNL at Home.

  The governor (who I think is fabulous and smart and tough) responds that she liked the sketch (!!!), but I was drinking the wrong beer. I had her drinking a Labatt Blue instead of one of the many Michigan craft beers. I get an email saying she wants to send me a “Michigan treat.” I think she’s going to send some beer here. It’s very cool.

  I get defensive at first. I know Michigan has tons of craft beer! Of course! I remember friends driving across the border to get Bell’s Oberon. That was how to be a beer snob in my Chicago suburb growing up: you knew your Michigan beer and would make the drive to get it.

  I get a lot of nice messages today from people in Michigan on my Instagram. It makes me feel good. I want to say, “I love Michigan!” And I do love Michigan. I do feel a warmth, but I think it’s just from lumping it in with my general connection to the Midwest. Or maybe the beautiful southeastern Michigan scenery from vacations with family and friends when I lived in Chicago.

  And then I remember why I have this connection there. And what’s behind the little tug on my heart when I think of Michigan.

  Over the summer right after my freshman year of college in California I came back to Oak Park for my summer break. I was working as an intern for the company my dad worked for in Chicago. Trying to save some money. I saw a lot of friends that summer but missed one who was visiting because I bowed out of a party one Friday night. I was tired.

  My friend Erica. She was living in Kalamazoo with her older brother John. She was a carefree goofball with a billion different hairstyles all throughout life. After the party I skipped, she went back to Kalamazoo. And one afternoon that July she went to get a sandwich from Jimmy John’s. As she left the parking lot, her car was hit by a train.

  I went to work the day I heard, in a daze. And then I think I was stuffing envelopes around a table and I said, “My friend was hit by a train and they don’t know if she’ll come out of her coma.” The other interns stared at me.

  “Maybe you should go home.”

  “Yeah, I think I should.”

  A large group of friends and family gathered at the hospital in Kalamazoo. I think I only went into her room once or twice. We held her hands and sang to her and forgot all the lyrics to every song. We slept on the floor in the lobby, and I would sometimes silently watch Erica’s mom working away in her notebooks, drawing sketches of Erica’s face.

  We sat on the lawn outside of the hospital mostly. Just being with each other, trying to figure out how this was happening. It was sunny, and so it was the nicest spot to camp out while you waited for your friend to pass away. Every time I heard a helicopter, I’d make eye contact with another friend. We wondered if it was there for her organs. She was a donor. Always a generous person who took it upon herself to look out for the underdogs. There was a homeless man who was around her house a lot. She always gave him what she had if she could. I only know this because he gave her brother $5 after hearing what happened to her, to help if he could. He wanted to give back to her.

  A radio station in Kalamazoo gave us a shout-out one day. They dedicated “Always Something There to Remind Me” to all “the people on the lawn.” We got tattooed at a local shop in Kalamazoo. All of us got the same symbol for laughter along with her initials, “EER,” but we got the tattoo on different parts of our bodies. I chose the back of my neck. It felt like a loving spot—a spot where I often remembered my dad mindlessly massaging me as we sat next to each other watching TV growing up.

  I went to the Jimmy John’s and found pieces of her headlight and held them and stared at them in my little hand, wondering if I should keep them or not. A man and woman stopped their car and came out to us, my friends and me, crying in the road. They saw the little pink memorial on a light post. She loved pink. The woman looked at me. “Was that your friend?” I nodded. “I’m so so sorry.” And she hugged me for a long time.

  Years later, I went door-to-door for Barack Obama in Kalamazoo with my dad and my stepmom and one of the nameless faceless boys I dated in Chicago. I wanted to visit the Jimmy John’s.

  You see, that particular crossing had seen over 140 or so accidents because it was on a weird angle and it was hard to see any oncoming traffic because of the trees. And the signal wasn’t working. Jimmy John’s was the only thing on that side of the tracks.

  After Erica’s accident, though, they fixed it. And I remember crying that day I went back and saw the improvements. You saved people, Erica.

  Her birthday is April 4, two days before Owen’s. It’s been seventeen years since she left us. And Saturday, I finally got to give a shout-out back to Michigan.

  Thank you, Michigan. I’ll get the beer right next time.

  May 3, 2020

  It’s raining and gloomy today. I text Jack: Why doesn’t whoever’s in charge of everything know the weather is a big determining factor in how my days feel?!

  It’s jarring watching TV right now. Everything that looks clear and doesn’t sound tinny makes me think of “before.” And again, I wonder how long my only way of connecting with people will be through so many screens and wires. I’ve never loved connecting that way. I was allowed to be stubborn about it before. Now I have no other option.

  Matt has been doing these theater classes over Zoom. He was explaining an exercise he did the other day and said they paired off and looked each other in the eyes and played the mirror game. I feel like screaming, “YOU AREN’T LOOKING ANYONE IN THE EYES! YOU ARE LOOKING AT A SCREEN! AND THERE’S A LAG IN ZOOM SO YOU AREN’T MIRRORING ANYONE.”

  That lag makes me think today that we are not living in the same time as each other. Communicating that way means we are always communicating from the future. There’s not a “real time” option. It makes me miss everyone even more. I feel so alone.

  I’ve never really been good at looking people in the eyes. It’s a challenge. I have social anxiety and I do this thing involuntarily where when I’m talking to someone, they think I’m looking at their forehead. It makes for a lot of awkward interactions. I have made a lot of men suddenly self-conscious about their hairlines. And then I get immediately self-conscious explaining, “No, I’m not looking at your forehead. I have social anxiety and I’m not always able to look people in the eyes and I never know when it’s happening.” I immediately create a vulnerable an
d intimate situation and I don’t want that with most new people I’m meeting.

  A couple years ago I took a vacation to Seville and Ibiza with my friend Mackenzie. She was my travel companion for a while. She’s a great companion for me. She’s naturally very social, and I like having people like that around me because I’ve always felt incapable of being good at talking to strangers.

  In Seville, we find this “secret” after-hours spot Bicicleteria. Her English friend with a funny lisp tells us about it. He says we need a password (“pathword”) to get in. Turns out being young and female is even better than a password. Mackenzie easily talked us in. We go twice.

  The first night we sit with a group of travelers from a nearby hostel in this dimly lit, smoky room. It’s sort of red, the lighting. The bar serves what they have until they run out. People are passing around a joint. There’s a boy who sticks out to me because I don’t like his energy. He’s smug and kind of rude to everybody. In my head, I turn him into a rich prep school asshole. I have no idea if he is rich or in school. At one point he turns to Mackenzie and says, “Your face is weird.” What a nasty little brat. I don’t like him. Later, he turns to me and says something like, “What do you know? You’re so drunk you can’t even look me in the eyes.” I’m not so drunk. And he doesn’t get to know about my anxiety.

  I stare at him with a frightened look on my face and say, “No. I can’t look you in the eyes because there’s nothing there. It’s just black, you know? I can’t see anything there.” He laughs uncomfortably. I stay staring. “I’m not joking. It’s terrifying.” He doesn’t know how to respond. I can look you in the eyes now, I think. He ends up leaving not long after. I am so proud of myself.