Isolation in its forms

A lonely war: a world’s worth of soldiers, each in their homes. Summoned to shut doors, abandon walkways, deny the instinct to embrace. The enemy is at large and lurking. Panic traipses from city to city dropping rose petals sewn with toxic ideology. A sociophagic rot crops up in backyards behind white fences and rattly gates, all. The safest camp is the one you keep; barricades are door frames. By the grace of some pantheist god there are pleasantries to be felt, still. A jovial sunburn where the window’s slat of UV has traced its persistence, hour after hour on idle arms. Kitchen herb boxes never better cared for, and pantries never fuller. Bedsheets never more unkempt. Chickpea pebbles awaiting their soak. The last of the milk wiped away at the back of a hand. At four o’clock there’s a siren call of restlessness, and on good days it passes with mercy. Up and down the ranks, there are messages of goodwill. We are not far from each other, though we tell ourselves we must be. A man in his lavender housecoat steps out onto his balcony to observe the eight-ish strawberries and cream of the sky; his semblance refracts into silent counterparts, each in their living rooms, their driveways, their no-windowed basement units. Duty and deference for the many. The plastic of a pasta bag fluttering before salted steam. Ornery can openers teething themselves with rusted gums. Liquor closets never better cared for, and beer fridges never fuller. The last of the Rittenhouse wiped away at the back of a hand. For all the change, the war motive is clear: stay away, fight together; do whatever you need to find the peace in both initiatives. They are not opposed.

Day 5: normalcy opposes essentialism. Today I was trying to describe my discomfort at giving business to select small “grocery stores” which to me seem actually quite non-essential (the ethical butcher, the high-end alimentari) from the passenger seat of an Evo while my boyfriend sought normalcy at the gas pedal’s depression. We don’t ever fight, I maintain, but it became an argument on the drive. I tried to colour-correct my own occupational misgivings by appropriating other employees’ experiences into my own, as in, if I needed to stop going to work for my health, mustn’t these people feel the exact same way? Withhold your patronage, I expounded from my high horse, make do with the ransacked aisles of the Safeway and hold your privileged tongue. But this begged the question of what do these businesses need? Are the clerks and cashiers truly beleaguered by customer existence? Shouldn’t we support them now, while we can, before we dive into the cavernous catalogue of closures, which hovers above our heads every time we refresh the news? These were good points, made by my boyfriend, so I did the look-out-the-window-say-nothing thing for the remainder of the drive. And this was shameful because it became more evident how little I knew of the diametric struggle we’re all facing: how to be normal vs. how to limit ourselves to the essential. I put up a fuss for some reason and what? One particular man was made to feel ashamed by his pursuit of a regular old day cruising around, running errands, his girl buckled in beside him. The hope in this excursion was punctured, irreparably, because I was sad. I shook all the rest of the afternoon like a flayed sapling and let him see the tears in my hair. I said sorry a great many times. I still don’t know what how to weave ordinary goodness into this new life without pricking my fingers.

Old world: the people wake from restful sleeps and recall dreaming of block parties. Kids turned loose on residential alleyways, a row of paternal barbecues blowing blue smoke and the smell of sizzled franks. There’s a soccer ball that keeps weaving in and out of frame like a talisman, a reminder of location. Vibrant northwest poplar leaves usher hushed white noise up and down the street when a wind comes through. Smells, sights, sounds making up meaning. University kids back for the summer, too green to be involved seriously in neighbourhood politics, stand at the edges of their respective driveways pretending to enjoy the Budweiser they’ve been offered by someone’s mom, being sure to remain visually available to the crowd in case the subject of their lonerness is to come up later, at home. And everyone’s homes have been frenzied all afternoon, from the front lawns receiving a hasty tidy to the garages enduring their annual spelunking to retrieve the frisbee that must be buried back there under one of those boxes. Kitchens have been overrun with last-minute potluck import. There are burgers and hot dogs, of course; there is a ping pong table appropriated as a chip/salsa station; there is potato salad and store-bought coleslaw and blackened, butter-lacquered corn-on-the-cob; there are two kinds of summer berry pies and a generous pail of vanilla ice cream set into a cooler of runny ice cubes. Someone had the ecological prudence to go out and get compostable forks and knives (although inevitably most people mistakenly allocate their used cutlery to the garbage, much to that one neighbour’s chagrin). After the cookout act is more or less over – nothing but salty sand at the bottom of the chip bags, one or two propane tanks spent in valour, the minimum number of helpings so as to be polite removed from the platter of ambrosia salad – there is an earnest attempt to get a baseball game going, over in the park next to the school, just a few minutes’ walk away. Some parents jump at the chance like they really have been waiting all summer for this. Some need to get their mucked-up kids washed and to bed, and they say their goodbyes with pragmatic decorum. Some exchange little winks and say yeah we’ll meet you there and then go off to someone’s house to quickly share a joint. The cleanup team moves in like a parade of volunteer ants, doing their best to hunt down stray napkins and return lent dishware to their corresponding street numbers. The alleyways still echo with cacophonous running shoe rhythm. The sun doesn’t plan to retire just yet. The evening of this dream only melts when sleep loses its hold over the restful, wandering heads.

Welcome, mirth: there are three wine bottles on the countertop and two are open. The spirits are high – eager, almost – with dinner frying up in coquettishly sparking oil, with the Amazoned board game at the ready atop the coffee table. We blame our reckless joy on a scrap of old lore: “Thank god it’s Friday.” The most menial things can be so wonderful, can’t they? As in, we can’t help but tease out vestigial import in a time of now-meaningless calendar days, and though we’ve suckled beer like guileless calves all week we can now dip shamelessly into full-on inebriation. We can emulsify our diminishing acumen with the warbled and confusing picture of our world; like dissolves like.

Breweries are rolling out vans, outfitted internally like beehives of cardboard and aluminum; the sharpest of the Apoidea couldn’t produce liquid so sweet. Wine bars are rescinding their closure-announcement heartbreak, now rallying bicycle fleets weighted with panniers that clink. The search term “quarantini” reached peak popularity on March 14. Media content is extolling the home-alone libation, pontificating about the bottle of $9 rosé, heralding old fashioneds and negronis as glass-bound, minimalist piety. Never has there been a better time to indulge in drink.

In our home, there’s been an evacuation of guilt – for the hangover, for the gradual ethanol poisoning, for the induced delusion and forgetfulness sure to confuse our next-day reality – and that alone is levity of a novel age. How fluidly we embrace the lack of badness, when we can. Cheersing friends from last lifetime through twinned phone screens. Pre- and post-dinner tipples at the work-from-home dining table. Saying “one more” at least twice. And languishing, languishing, languishing until all the week’s restlessness precipitates sleep. Tossing and waking in the night, yes, but with pleasant anamnestic glimmers to put us back under.

7: It is from the safety of my duvet that I may soliloquize. It feels selfish to stale on my own faint little woes, but I’ll be the first to say I am selfish by nature, and it turns out I’m even more selfish mid-pandemic. I oscillate between unfounded merriness and sweltering discomfort, relying on the hour-by-hour presence of dread to influence my behaviour. These times are not normal; we know this. We all understand the loneliness of keeping apart, the spoiled sincerity of missing our favourite bars, the frantic fear of impeding the personal space of another human in the outdoors. I just don’t know how to reconcile what we know with what I need in order to keep existing.

There is said to be comfort in that we have no choice but to assimilate into this new culture. The platitude dictates we are all in this together. It’s just that, selfishly, again, I tend to fixate more favourably on the brain and body I keep than I do the big picture, and I can’t help but wonder of the micro-crisis that threatens to really snap the spine of this situation. Put plainly: what if you very much dislike yourself and you also must be isolating? Your brain, your body, are the only companions allowable. Today’s bespoke strangeness was just a blooming blue bruise under my skin; a preview. I extrapolate the losses – of work, of routine, of purpose – and it seems that the sadness really could get much worse.

Time gave up on its march and has taken a rest. All afternoon I might remain in bed, air-tight in my feelings, watching a hopeless sun poke in and out of the world. The floor of our house creaks with the action of braver roommates, who wake up to the same weird reality and quell the misery long enough to start their work days, however altered, however disheartening. Or they move around the knickknacks on their cerebral shelving, slicking dust into atmospheric mist, take up an old artifact – a hobby, a lesson, a novel – and involve their concern in their discovery. And outside there are families out for a walk, toddlers in step with the whistling metric of stroller wheels; maybe there were pancakes for breakfast, a rare treat turned necessary pleasantry. The platitude dictates. How to catch this sentiment and keep it fluttering within my fingers, though. How to stack all the water cups left near the bed and levitate them to the sink. How to be good, and be safe, and be normal.

All afternoon and then evening. Yellow panels on wooden siding, where the sunset tarries. My room still a safehaven of inaction against the turbulence beyond. But then percussion, of a sort, clatters upwards and invites itself in at the window. Tin or aluminum, crowing with glee. And voices of neighbours and their kids, and clapping from the house across the street. An inexplicable horn, a rusted, beaten dinner bell. My half-crooned elegy softens, fades, before the happy and unexpected music. Strangers shouting thank you! Utility trucks braying, their operators leaning out the windows to be caressed by the shimmery sound. Very far away, tankers’ calls harmonizing in their imperfect consonance, swelling to meet actual cheers in the city’s salt-washed bays. Hand-made posters with smiley stick figure faces hanging in street-view windows. Police vehicles in praise outside the hospital, blinking their triptych colours like they were fairy lights. Sentiment rising with the relief of a candle just blown out, at ease and still warm and no longer suffocating.

I thought joy, in these times, had to be predicated by sorrow, or else be irrational. As if tenderness doesn’t count right now, as if my sorrow alone could achieve any higher-order meaning. There is a lot of darkness and we each get our piece; mine is real, yours is real, each claim varies but all are strung together by validity. There is no patchwork cloth extant, though, that doesn’t also have room for gratitude. And I forget this all the time – selfish by nature – but there are better people out there living, listening, posting up in their homes all alone for the initiative, walking into hospital wards where they will show courage and fight for the dying, recruiting supplies for those without, distributing goods free-of-charge because their liquidity does not outweigh their morals, giving aid through whatever channel and in whatever currency, calling, checking in, remembering to smile especially now, performing essential duties despite the mounting risk, writing reports and compiling statistics because knowledge is paramount, researching, inventing, waiving rent, leaving notes at doorsteps offering help getting groceries, arranging group chats to see make sure everyone is okay, sitting on the patio ringing a rusted dinner bell to say thank you with each sonorous spark and making sure to pour a little beer for me and shaking me out of my sheets to come down and join in. So down the stairs my body goes. Out onto the porch to clap. I don’t act in jest, nor to play a role. Part of it is big and wide; part of it is intended for the handful of faces keeping me lucid.

And I do not know what more to say now than thank you. Thank you, and it’s still very hard sometimes, but it’s better to see familiar faces through the fog. The platitude dictates in honesty and with love.

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