This Will All Be Over Soon

by Cecily Strong

  * * *

  NOW HERE I am today in this room in my rental house in the Hudson Valley with three pots and two mugs of basil sitting next to the south-facing window. I’m hoping I can take care of something else. I am doing okay with Lucy, I think, and trying to always get better at taking care of myself. I haven’t always been very good at it. So we’ll see.

  And suddenly I remember the daffodils.

  Laurel planted daffodils the day Owen was born.

  I hope someday I can plant daffodils at a place that I call my home.

  May 20, 2020

  The last SNL at Home airs tonight.

  It’s been really hard to make this show. We’ve set up a mini studio and it seems I’m working all day. I’m doing my hair and makeup and trying to make costumes out of whatever was in my suitcase and whatever the wardrobe department finds on Amazon that can be shipped quickly. Kevin makes all my props. He’s a good little artist!

  We film the final scene all together in the guest room upstairs. Matt holds my phone to film. He’s wearing an earpiece so he can hear our director Paul, who is watching through some new technology I had to download that lets SNL into my phone so they can see what I’m filming in real time. It seems crazy to let your phone be hacked, but I’m not worried about normal worrisome things right now. It’s too exhausting.

  We are filming a scene in bed. Kevin has reheated a slice of pizza we used earlier as a prop. It’s supposed to be like a real New York slice of pizza: big and greasy and cheesy and delicious. We are making a scene about being in the city again. Dreaming we are doing all of the things we miss in New York. I’m seeing a Broadway show. And eating a slice of pizza. I didn’t write the sketch, my friends Kent and Anna did, but they sure got me right.

  The sketch is especially poignant because just as we cannot be in the city doing any of these things, we can’t make a sketch or video or our show like we normally do. So my quarantine roommate films me on my iPhone as SNL’s director watches from his computer somewhere wherever he is, and I’m holding a small, hard, burnt piece of pizza made in our oven. In a guest bedroom at an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley.

  Lucy is in the shot. She’s not an actress. She always seems to know when I’m trying to take a picture of her and turns her head away, immediately stopping whatever funny thing she was doing that made me want to get a photo or video. She’s no different now. My director, watching through my phone, asks if I can get her to bark or make a sound. She’s normally pretty talkative but of course will not make any sound right now and doesn’t seem to even want to be on this bed anymore. We get what we can. SNL at Home is a “get what we can” show right now.

  I watch the sketch that night. It’s really amazing. They’ve put the whole cast back in the city, through our at-home green screens. I watch as my castmates seem to be waving goodbye to me. Before I wake up again in my bed, with my dog, realizing it was just a dream. But I’m still holding this piece of pizza.

  It’s not my bed, though. I’m miles and months away from my real bed in my apartment. This pizza I’m holding is like cardboard, almost inedible. Far from the juicy slices so celebrated in New York that videos of rats carrying it go viral.

  And at the end, there’s a shot of Lucy, and she’s sort of looking at the pizza and she whimpers.

  It’s not Lucy whimpering, though. It’s just a sound effect.

  May 22, 2020

  I have had a new favorite song for a while. “To Live a Life” by First Aid Kit. I like it because there are few songs that describe the kind of loneliness I feel without getting too theatrical or insincere or, at worst, angry. I like this part:

  I’m just like my mother

  We both love to run…

  But there is no other way to live a life alone

  I like tying this to my mom. My mom is open to dating, but not really. She’s open to dinners. Vacations. She wants friends and dogs. She explains to me that it’s all a compromise, and she maybe doesn’t want to do that at this point in her life. She did that for sixteen years. Her heart was broken. And my mom painfully and with great difficulty moved on. What good is a compromise if you feel you are betraying yourself a little, and then you find out it was one-sided the whole time and it turns out people don’t actually work on an honor system? I don’t blame her.

  As I get older, I start looking at my cells basically under a microscope to see where my mother and I overlap. I am afraid we have too many similar genetic sections or whatever that keep us both mistrustful, afraid, self-conscious. We seem to exist in similar loneliness, but somehow my being single is an offense. Hers is, as far as I can tell among people who matter, a strong fabulous choice.

  But don’t get me wrong. She is strong. And smart. Sometimes too clinical/hospital. She’s got a sort of compartmentalization you must have to be able to work in health care (which of course stands out to me as a person who went to theater school). But it can feel a little cold sometimes. For instance, when I called her because I needed my mom after the first bad news during Owen’s last week, she said, “Shit. He’s dying.”

  “Mama, please,” I said. “I know. I can’t say it or think it. Not in those words or any. I can’t give up on someone who has made it clear he’s not giving up.”

  Remembering her humanity before just being a retired nurse practitioner in crisis mode, she said, “Don’t count him out. Go visit him.”

  Of course, I would never get to visit. I had those sudden, cruel couple of hours.

  I think this is one of my biggest takeaways. Not one he taught me, necessarily, but maybe one I just figured out and put into my own words. Owen never showed us he was sad or scared. He could be frustrated, sure. But—and maybe it was because I wasn’t his immediate family or his girlfriend—the majority of the time I got to see him, even though the cancer and all the treatments were the elephant in the room, Owen performed a magic trick and he Stephen King “thinner”-ed that damn elephant. His ingenuity and leadership could never be matched. He had stories and laughter and music as his ways of telling us about his experiences, or what he called his “troubles,” and that elephant shrank. We always talked about something else for the most part.

  I had this question posed to me recently: “How did Owen do it?”

  I don’t know.

  I never asked. Doesn’t feel like something to ask. Just to believe.

  I think it became pretty clear to me, from the moment my handsome string bean opened his door to me that night for dinner, that a cancer diagnosis, even brain cancer, for a person you love, who has made it clear their intention is to “win,” can be taken no other way than “YES YOU WILL WIN.” Cancer doesn’t have rules. Like so many evil things. How do you play in a game where there are no rules and it’s unfair and you may not last till the end of the game?

  I don’t know.

  Add it to my pile of questions.

  I think the minute someone is given a cancer diagnosis, you stop asking them so many questions. And I’m one for honesty, to my own detriment. So maybe this is a good lesson to learn. You will have questions keep you up at night. You can yell them to an empty room. Write them in a journal. In a book. But you can’t ask them.

  This is why I can’t write Owen’s complete story. I only know what he showed me, and I tried not to ever be intrusive, and what he showed me was the most special human on earth.

  But maybe… if I’m allowing myself to even form the questions in my brain right now, I would want to ask:

  What does surgery feel like? What does chemo feel like? Does your head hurt? What do you think will happen to you? Is it okay with you that I’m scared? Do you know I cry about you all the time, mainly because I love you so much, but also because the truth is I’m really scared and I can’t say that out loud? Am I allowed to ask you so many questions? This isn’t a question, but thank you for coming into my life again. Can I tell you that while I’m maybe not cult-member wide-eyed convinced you’ll be okay, I really am sincerely convinced? Because it’s you and t
he alternative is unfathomable. Is that okay to say? Have you ever been scared? I have. How do you get around it? Do you know how very deeply I love you and Leda? And where is the European-detective-show-style whiteboard that I can stand in front of every night like a hotshot, trying to answer the biggest question?

  The biggest question is not what you think. It isn’t my dad’s question: why did this happen. Not yet, not to me. I want to know how. I want to know how to best look at the fear and uncertainty in your own life, but also in every face around you that loves you and can’t hide their sympathy and worry, and not give in. I want to know how to not just say but feel the words you texted at the Knicks/Bulls game:

  Psh well not with that attitude you can’t.

  I’m trying, O. I’m listening for you.

  May 28, 2020

  We have one more week in this house before we have to pack up and move out because another renter booked it for a long-term rental. It’s really sad to leave, and I’ve loved our host, Megan, and appreciated all of the kindness she’s shown us, but I also never want to feel like I’m taking advantage or making things more difficult for anyone. I decided I am not ready to go back to my apartment in the city though. Even thinking about the possibility of being in that apartment again brings on a panic and crushing loneliness. So we found a new rental home nearby, in Rhinebeck, and I’ll spend more of the summer there. I’m thinking about maybe trying to grow my own lettuce there. Maybe tomatoes. Who knows?

  I’m going to try to make it a home.

  With this pause in life, I am trying hard not to feel like I’m losing time. It seems a losing thought, but one I keep inching toward. It’s not useful thinking and feels ultimately unnecessary. Everyone talks about 2020 like it’s the worst year they’ve ever seen. But they said that about 2016, too. And 2017. I wonder when we will collectively say something is a good year.

  Although I’m moving around different rentals in the Hudson Valley this summer, I do have a house of my own in Los Angeles. I haven’t thought about it much. It’s been hard. Because it’s in California, and I don’t know when I’ll get there again. I don’t know when I’ll even get on a plane. Plus, I’m still a bit stubborn about being on the East Coast right now, holding on to some resentment maybe about the way New York was hit so hard and left to drown. How some articles seem to blame New York for the spread. How people didn’t believe me at first during those early weeks in March. And I haven’t let go of it yet. I’m afraid of not being close to New York, to people who maybe share that sentiment in some way. New York is also where my family lives. Leda is here. Jack is here. I’m afraid if I leave, I won’t be able to come back. And I’m not ready for that yet.

  So I’m making a temporary home out here, even if that means a couple of different houses and some storage containers. I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch for me. Even with my LA house, I have split the last couple of years between there and New York. I think I’m comfortable moving around because I never have to feel “stuck.” I like wearing different hats. (Or wigs in my case. I have a wig drawer in LA.) I like watching the Michael Jordan documentary and remembering growing up in Chicago, and considering that a part of my identity. I like being able to say I’m someone who made a life in New York. It’s a hard city! I like the late nights and the hard work and the fact that everything feels attainable. I can get anything I need delivered to me. I can walk to work. I can get home at five a.m. and order Indian food if I want. Then, I like having a home in LA, where I am a person who can exercise in the yard in the sunshine and eat fresh produce. I make lots of salads. I get flowers delivered once every two weeks. I had a standing “greenery” order where I got palm leaves and bear grass delivered to display in vases around the house. I love bringing up the greenery because I’ve never been a person who thought about buying leaves for my home, or that the leaves are called greenery. I had to google that when I moved in. I am proud of myself for making a life in both places. But I think I like having both partly because maybe I’m scared to “choose” which person I am. I don’t have to quite settle anywhere.

  I bought my house in 2017. I had been staying in Airbnbs in LA every summer and liked the change. I enjoyed the homes, but they were never mine. I also felt like my life had become stagnant somehow, not having the milestones other people have to acknowledge growth and progression. I wasn’t going to get married any time soon. I wasn’t planning on having children soon. And I didn’t want that to be something I mourned. I don’t think my life has ever taken a normal trajectory, and I’ve found that when I embrace “veering off” instead of beating myself up, I am open to unexpected nice things and I am even able to sometimes feel lucky. I got expelled from public school and then dropped out. I wasn’t sure I’d graduate high school. But my life didn’t end. Instead I found my wonderful art school. I found my joy again. I graduated on time. I met Megu.

  I found my house with a wonderful Realtor who held my hand through the whole process. I did a commercial for Triscuit crackers in 2017 and finally felt like I was ready to make a big investment. I wasn’t totally financially comfortable, but maybe there’d be more Triscuit commercials in my future, you know? I would make it work. I wanted, really needed, my own life milestone. I am not a movie star. I’m not married. I don’t have kids. But I have a fucking home!

  It’s a little midcentury home with exposed beams and a cool spiral staircase and hardwood floors. It’s got a 1970s vibe that I love. I don’t know that I have a particular aesthetic or style, but if I do, I think it’s that. My friend Markus came with me to the open house. It didn’t have a big kitchen or bathroom, which are both important to me—a separate bathtub and shower is basically how I would describe the height of luxury—so I wasn’t totally sold on it. Markus is a photographer and filmmaker and has much more of an eye for what something can be, and he told me I couldn’t pass on that house. I could make a kitchen. I could make a bathroom. But the bones of the house were the most important. He was right.

  I found an amazing designer named Nicole, and she worked magic and built me my dream home. I have a giant bathtub now. I have ample counter space and an Italian stove! I have banquet seating! I cried when I saw my house all finished. I felt more loved than I had in a long time, if that makes sense.

  If you can’t tell, I feel disorganized and messy most of the time. I’ve never really known how to explain who I am. I seem to just keep talking (or writing, in this case) and hoping someone gets a sense of me that way. This designer, Nicole, had many conversations with me, sometimes over margaritas, and she really learned about me better than I think I ever have. Every detail she added in the home felt personal and felt like a gift from someone who not only had figured me out but seemed to celebrate me as well. I don’t easily celebrate myself or know how to love myself correctly. I have felt unlovable or unlikable at my lowest. I’ve felt those lows for years: in grade school, where I sought out other aliens; when my dad walked out and I lost my best friend; when my first love, Henry, and I broke up; when my second love, Michael, left me in 2014, saying I was a “firecracker” and he wanted something more peaceful. (I hear this often from boys I’ve dated—it’s partly why I consider myself a werewolf.)

  Nicole designed a home for me that I loved so much and was so proud to show off. It was as if she was showing me the best parts of myself, which are sometimes harder to pinpoint when everything is disorganized. And harder to see because the lows are so much louder than the highs. I’m trying my best these days to give them equal weight.

  Thinking about this reminds me of a really special moment my senior year at that art school. I had somehow been allowed into an established group of friends who were all a thousand times cooler than I was. Painters and musicians, real artists, who seemed so comfortable with themselves. I always say I think I was the coolest I’ve ever been when I was eighteen. Because I got to be around these people. One girl, Mary, was a painter with dreadlocks and a nose ring. She dated a friend of mine for a while. We weren’
t particularly close, as I always felt like I lacked the elegance or grace she seemed to carry naturally. I felt like I was kind of the physical embodiment of Roseanne singing the national anthem—jarring and loud and awkward.

  I was shocked when Mary said she had a gift for me for my birthday. I didn’t know she ever thought about me! Her gift was a homemade wallet made of index cards that she’d painted and then laminated with packing tape and stitched together. It was a swirling mix of dark purple and blue and black. I thought it was really really pretty. She wrote a note with the wallet. I can’t remember her exact wording but she said something along the lines of, “Sometimes the most beautiful things come from dark places.”

  I carried that wallet with me for years until it disintegrated finally, as things do.

  I realize as much as I’ve tried not to settle in anywhere, I’ve let it settle in me that maybe I am a monster, a firecracker, too chaotic. Maybe my dark parts, my anger and depression and anxiety, make me impossible to truly love.

  But Nicole and Mary saw something else. Something colorful and beautiful even.

  Owen and Leda kept showing up for me.

  And then Jack. He’s still around, isn’t he?