Wilfred coat (similar)
Oak + Fort top (c/o) (similar)
Mango jeans
Aldo boots (similar)
Chanel handbag
RayBan sunglasses
Mejuri bracelet (c/o) (similar)
Aurate NY ring (c/o)
Location: CHANEL – Chicago, Illinois
Every time I sit down to write, I tell myself that I will write about something other than the strange and unaltering half-life we’ve all been living for the better part of the past month. But I can’t. The problem I face is a simple one; there is nothing else. We sit inside. We work, if we can. Some days, we anticipate small things – Wednesday night takeout orders, the weekly trip to the grocery store, a delivery of new books. But we can anticipate little else. The future is suspended, hung up in uncertainty. At times, the rules of our currently reality alter several times in a single day. We can look forward by the hour, but not much more than that.
The future, at present, is little more than the next days and weeks. The next FaceTime conversation about the news. And the next bottle of wine. There is nothing else to talk about because there is, at least for the time being, nothing else to our lives. We spend so much of the present planning for the future – for birthday parties and holiday celebrations and travels. But those moments, the ones that connect our mundane moments together into the months and years that make up a life, are all temporarily forbidden for the good of public health. And with nothing to plan for there is, it turns out, not much to life at all.
It’s not that I feel a sense of hopelessness, but that I feel nothing at all. With the future suspended, I am suspended, too – still putting one foot in front of the other, moving back and forth from my bedroom, to my office, to my living room, existing without actually living. Most of what mattered deeply to me a month ago now seems trivial at best. The past is past. And the future is a question mark, leaving very little in between.
Nothing is forever, of course. But nothing is guaranteed, either. And when we can all move on from this, it’s hard to know what life will look like. The future may not look much like the past that I so dearly loved, and while I can acknowledge that, I’m not ready to contemplate the alternatives. So, for now, I exist, hoping that some day soon, I’ll have something more meaningful to say for myself.
I feel like I’m in a very bizarre state of limbo these days, where I’m mostly just managing and going through the motions but not feeling like there’s ton of meaning to any of it (I guess the one exception would be time spent hanging out with Eleanor, which continues to be a little bubble in itself). It’s strange and more than a little uncomfortable.
Courtney ~ Sartorial Sidelines
I don’t know what to do with all this uncertainty about the future, about when things will be ‘normal’ again. A few weeks ago we thought we’d be through it by now, but the timeline seems to get pushed everyday. A month ago I was looking forward to my Easter Birthday, to seeing all my family, to going out with friends the Saturday before, and now I feel like I just want to skip it all together, postpone it until I feel like there is something worth celebrating.