My workshop professor asked us to keep a Pandemic Diary after the university I’m attending made the choice to go online for the rest of the semester. I made my first entry on March 14th, a day after I left New York for Toronto. At 10:20 pm I wrote “I don’t want to keep this diary. I don’t want to write about what I don’t want to remember.”
I’ve been staying with my boyfriend’s parents for the past two weeks, which is very lucky. His mother makes us dinner and we have desks to work at and at night we watch an “evening program” which has mostly been him exposing me to Star Wars and me indulging us in revisiting the Harry Potter films. During the day I do a little work, I read a bit, I feel afraid, I feel cranky, and I write in my Pandemic Diary.
I write “Today I told Danny his mustache smelled like eggs. That was cruel. Even if it did. I feel disgusted by everything and afraid. I don’t want to feel afraid I want to feel in love.” I write “I am not bored at all” I write “Okay the goal tomorrow is to not write about petty things.”
The other day I went on a walk and found a pond. It was small and quiet and in the woods beside it there was a tiny wooden pink birdhouse. I was cranky (my pandemic mood) and so listening to Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour which is an album I used to listen to unironically but which now feels embarrassing. I was alone and trying to get my heart rate up so my lungs would have to work a little harder than they do when I sink into the couch and let my neck push forward to a 90-degree angle and I stay for so long my hips start to hurt.
I have a friend who is symptomatic and quarantining. I have a parent whose job is considered essential and is thus leaving home every day, exposing herself to potential infection. I have family with asthma. When I left New York I knew I couldn’t really do much about anything until I’d completed my two-week self-isolation. That time period is almost up and I’m hoping I will be able to make myself useful in more ways. But if staying home is the best thing I can do then I will continue to do that. There’s been a move to start some community writing classes online and I will help facilitate those, which is a small thing but also nice.
These are confusing and scary times. I hope you are safe and well and not feeling too alone. Yesterday I took Danny back to the pond I found and we stopped to look at the water and the reflected sky. Everything I see outside feels unexpectedly beautiful. A road. A closed family diner. A gas station with red signs jutting into the clear and quiet sky. I keep an embarrassing Pandemic Diary where I write things like “For some reason I think my history professor has a crush on a woman in our class, a PhD student, named Tamara. I think I think this because he said ‘Tamara you had something interesting to say today…’ based on the stupid discussion post she put up in our online class forum.” and I want to feel bigger and more connected but I feel itchy, uneasy. So I walk to get out of my head, down the road into the neighbourhood where the geese don’t move for me but I don’t expect them to, where I stop and look into pond water that is so clear I can see algae blooming electric green on the wet grass under the glass surface of the water and I think, well, I think I could just walk right in.