Last week

Last week I woke up to lockdown. It's not that it hadn't bothered me before - more that I had anaesthetised my own wants. I took comfort in this brutal reality being designed of compassion: solidarity enacted, preserving resources for those most in need. The extraordinary status of our present ordinary etc... The contact we crave is not an option. We are all having to manage and that is ordinary, or it is for now. Really, I think I'd not given lockdown any space in my feelings.

My paltry participation in this global crisis felt very much easier to me than the thing with which I was grappling on an individual level. A tweak of perspective and the brutality of lockdown becomes safety. Difficult things have become ordinary these last eleven months - but my preoccupation has been ordinary since time immemorial. I find it extraordinary - I am incandescent with the injustice of it all - how enduringly ordinary and heart-achingly common my situation is.

I do not like to name it; I find myself talking around it, using oblique terms that only allude and leave my friends awkward, wondering. Sometimes I use legal jargon I barely understand, finding a safe distance in the clinical specificity of its articulation.

At times I barely believe I am in these circumstances. In tactless comparison, my grandmother's recent demise felt natural; its pain did not scream with shock at the intrinsic wrongness of it all. I have been stunned by unnecessary it is, its inherent nastiness. And have felt guilty asking for help with this when I can see everyone else is going through so much, too.

Sometimes the event insists on its presence in my present. I dream of it. It stakes a claim on my time and my energy that I do not mean to grant, that I find infinitely frustrating - but I begin to see this makes sense. And, more and more often, it does fuck off for a while. I read - and love reading - poetry; I do some academic writing; I indulge in writing this; I manage to amuse a friend!

The same friend accompanied me to a meeting at the police station last week. Perhaps for seeing his three-dimensional form, eyes flashing the same colour as his mask, I am aware again of how odd it is not to touch. I am alive again to the unnatural, inhuman cruelty of not being able to hug and I am so glad of that. For a time I had felt too tense, too tainted to miss it.

Tomorrow I will see another friend - distantly, of course. The last few times I have seen her, she has looked worried, kind eyes creased with concern. I take comfort from my own longing for the day I can hold her as close as this last year has kept us distant. By then we won't have to pretend that this is ordinary.