April 1, 2020
Part 1:
Every time I go outside I feel like I can breathe.
When everything else in my world has stopped, I go outside to move my body. I start the timer on my watch and I run, pushing keenly into a renewed connection with my city and myself. I run, and picture a wake materializing behind me, imagine shedding the sticky film of claustrophobic indoor air. Down a narrow staircase to the park I run, careful not to touch the railing, smiling gratefully when people back into the woods to let me pass. I run along a muddy path by a pond, weaving wide berths around other movers, other runners and walkers and weary parents pointing out wildlife to rainboot-clad toddlers. Plock, plock, plock, go my shoes, like springtime plungers, and I feel released, unbound.
The swans are still haughty, the geese are still indignant, the ducks still waddle purposefully in search of food, and the chipmunks still insist on launching themselves across the path just as I run by. It feels good. The sun looks like spring. It is as I heard a florist say on the radio the other day: “you can’t stop the flowers from blooming.”
During these runs I am wholly present in my place and time, not one week or six weeks or three months into an uncertain future and not two weeks or one month or four months back in a world that will never exist again, but right here, right now, trying to determine if I’ve got a headwind, waiting for my watch to buzz another kilometre, adjusting my tights which have never fit quite right. Such focus is a salve. When no one is looking I wipe my nose decorously with the forefinger of my right glove, cautiously preserved for that purpose. I am striding over roots, leaping over puddles, hoping that my knee doesn’t hurt, registering the sound of highway traffic, which somehow roars on regardless. I am running.
There are no llamas or birdwatching troupes on this path. There are no school groups or tourists with their cameras. The playgrounds and parking lots are closed off, strung with yellow tape and big white signs. People stroll alone or in pairs. I catch fragments of conversation—“he tried twice to get admitted…,” “it’s a rainy day, so…,” “it could be a bacterial…,” “see, that’s a red-winged blackbird…”—and then I’m gone, they’re gone, the interaction ended. One day, a city worker hangs perilously by a rope from a tall tree above the path. “Heads up!” he shouts as a branch crashes down behind me. I keep breathing. I was there to see it.
Part 2:
Every time I go outside I feel like I should hold my breath.
An invisible enemy is everywhere, or so we are told. Spiky particles lie in wait, spreading with insidious intent, as Eliot would have it, leading to those overwhelming questions, how many, how much, how long. Do I dare to touch a doorknob? I’d like to shine a black light on the world, bring all the contaminated surfaces to iridescent life. This would help with the placement of caution tape.
When I am outside I am more conscious than I have ever been of personal space. As soon as I step onto the sidewalk I triangulate my distance from others; like an air traffic controller, I devise a plan for how we will pass. I dislike the rudeness of this. I step into the street when I see someone approaching, and want to cry out, I’m not like this!, but they are already too far away.
As a child I used to play a strange, spy-inspired game with myself when I rode my bike up and down our sidewalk block. I imagined that everyone I passed was releasing a poison that would kill me, and so I had to hold my breath until we had pulled apart. Somehow the impulse lingered into adulthood, a private superstition like picking up pennies or avoiding cracks in the pavement. Who knew this fantasy might one day become, if not actually useful, so eerily real and relevant?
A sidewalk width apart is the closest I have been to another human in weeks.
I feel for families, of course, cooped up with all their overlapping moods and needs, and I feel, too, for everyone whose front-line jobs go on, who interact with others tirelessly in order to pull us all into the future. But there is a different madness in solitude. It is not unpleasant and certainly not unfamiliar to me, but it is, right now, noticeably total and without respite. Will some part of me go feral, I wonder, forget how to react in company, how to laugh, how to touch and be touched?
Every time I go outside I am terribly aware of this—of other people, nearby but far away, everyone just as dangerous and vulnerable as I am. These are people to whom I am connected, as we all perform our aimless laps around the neighbourhood, but also people from whom I must remain apart. Even a sidewalk width is too close, an overstep, a flagrant transgression of official boundaries.
When I go outside I practice physical distancing and I am also closer to other people than at any other time of day or night.
Recapitulation:
Every time I go outside the air smells of that spring cocktail of rotting leaves and grass, of wet earth inhaling. The flowers won’t stop blooming and I just keep moving, moving, away from the stillness of uncertainty, away from people and toward them, full of suspicion and longing, holding my breath as we pass, in concert with the held breath of the world.
