"When Violet and I finally decided to get married, I was in the middle of a depression so deep it had developed into something more like psychosis. I felt like I was pretending to be myself. I don't mean I was playing "the role" of the husband-to-be, the good son, the whatever. I mean I was going around thinking, What would I do right now if I were Malcolm?"
"I didn't feel like myself, but I wasn't inhabiting-I don't know-a persona or anything. I was a glitchy, mutating thing, a vague C.G.I. blur from the last act of a late-nineties blockbuster. I felt like multiple selves at once and also like maybe I didn't exist. We were hungry for joy. "Joy" was not the kind of word either of us had used unironically in the past, but some of our irony had been scoured off by loneliness and terror."
"We were having trouble being funny, except in abrupt, gallowsy ways. Violet's emergency medical instructions, taped to the refrigerator in March, included a funeral "do not play" list that was just "Livin' on a Prayer," "Takin' Care of Business," and "any version, rendition, or interpolation of 'Forever Young.' " It was offensive at that time to aspire to happiness, at least out loud, but people still seemed O.K. with the abstract idea of joy, as long as it was private, temporary. Fugitive."
A man preparing to marry Violet suffered a depression so deep it became psychosis-like, experiencing dissociation and feeling like multiple, glitchy selves. The couple sought fleeting joy amid loneliness, terror, and frequent patient deaths. They lived in the city in December while Violet, a hospital physician with high exposure risk, could not join others' 'pods.' They avoided casual comforts like sweatpants and binge-watching, drank alcohol, worked, worried, and walked. Friends met in parks at distance but drew closer over time. Emergency instructions on the refrigerator listed funeral 'do not play' songs. Happiness felt offensive aloud, acceptable only as private, temporary, fugitive moments.
Read at The New Yorker
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