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The Fallacy of Reentry
There’s a small stone set into the ground on the edge of the front lawn and the driveway at the house in Rhode Island where my mother grew up. It’s there to demarcate the border of two cities, the house in one, the driveway in the other. As a child, I was fascinated with this stone, and at the way something so small could mark where one thing began and another ended. It seemed so strange to me that I could stand in two places at once by putting one foot in the driveway and the other on the lawn. Why didn’t I feel different when I stepped over this stone, this invisible line?
Borders have always been artificial. This goes for the physical as well as the metaphysical. When we leave one room, close the door behind us, and enter another, isn’t there always something we leave behind of ourselves in that other room? We are never truly in just one place or in one time. We are never truly one thing or another.
In the same way that I am currently nearly 40, I am also still a deeply insecure 13-year-old trying to make the Jennifer Aniston haircut work for me, still a terrified 20-year-old getting diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder while studying abroad in Florence, still a beaming 30-year-old newlywed, still a shattered 32-year-old divorcee trying to make sense of life.
After I got hit by a car four years ago, I was largely restricted to my house so my broken ankle could heal properly. The break was a clean one, so I didn’t need surgery, but I did need to stay completely off my right leg for three months.
I have been thinking of this time in my life often over the last 18 months, for obvious reasons. Though I was alone in my three-month quarantine in 2017, everyone, the world over, was forced to stay indoors for months in the spring of 2020. At the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, I thought that the quarantine would feel less lonely than my personal quarantine, but I was wrong. Because even though I was the only person going through my particular situation then, I had a steady stream of visitors and the possibility of going out if someone was willing to help me down the stairs and go to places where I could navigate around on my scooter. With COVID-19, we weren’t allowed visitors or help. We were on islands of our own, the world frozen in a state of fear.
