I have no great hope we will use this chance to transform for the better – but this is an unconvincing darkness, and we do not have to stay in it
- This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020
In the pre-dawn hour, as the dark becomes less sure of itself, I get up to go to the hospital. It’s cold, and I have to fast before this surgery, so I take my Lexapro pill with a sip of water right away. I was diagnosed with cholesteatoma before the pandemic locked the world in its grip, and went on to the public waiting list. The ENT specialist told me it was a routine surgery, a cutting away of abnormal growth behind the ear canal; decades ago, people died from this, their own skin growing into their brains. There was some risk of deafness, or damage to a nerve that could paralyse half of my face, but he had never slipped yet.
I’m the kind of man who assumes such odds exist to spite me, so I was not reassured. My fiance, Hannah, drove us to St Vincent’s at 6am, and the roads were busy, maybe because the restrictions were set to ease the next day and people couldn’t wait, or maybe because capitalism is a death cult that will brook no surcease, people gotta eat or work to pay the landlords, and we passed the time by shaking our heads at everyone’s foolishness as a way of ignoring our own.
Related: Where can you be safe in this world? Maybe we're asking the wrong question | Jane Rawson
Let them all grind their bodies to the mill, for somewhere a bank balance must grow
Related: From the wreck of the pandemic we can salvage and resurrect an inner life | Nyadol Nyuon
I take comfort in performance in the absence of control
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