Reflections on living through a pandemic, seven months in.*

Here is what it is like:

You can go for bike rides and walks just like any other summer. I will remember this summer as: sitting on a bench in Cedarvale Park at dusk, the low light through the willow fronds at sunset along a certain stretch of the waterfront trail in Mississauga, the eerie loon-howls of coyotes in a small ravine, a woman calling for her cat in the dark. You can eat vegan pizza on a balcony and drink Chardonnay from plastic cups on a rock. You can watch raccoons ravage the grapevines from the porch with your neighbours. You can run along the lake to Mimico and eat hibiscus gelato on Queen Street. You can edit essays in the park while nannies run after toddlers in the splash pad and twelve-year-old boys discuss a girl called “Maddy” on the swings. This summer is new configurations.

Here is what it is also like:

For ten days in May there are tall metal fences and angry signs around all the cherry blossoms in the city; I will be fined $750 if I approach. One Sunday afternoon I am running up a sidewalk and a man yells at me, “You’re supposed to be on the other side—stupid!” There is no sidewalk on the other side of the street, but people are on edge; bodies and tempers alike must be given a wide berth. “Don’t stand so long over the bananas,” a woman snaps in No Frills. “Can I have your number?” a patio server asks me, and I feel confused until I realize it is for contact tracing. One day I have a curbside pickup at the library double-booked with a work Zoom meeting, so I leave myself muted while I dart across the street, where a woman in a mask hands me a paper bag of books; every element of this scenario would, eight months ago, have been inconceivable. The American president wanted to rip open his shirt to reveal a Superman logo as he dragged his body from the hospital and the Canadian prime minister has urged us, with Dickensian earnestness, to do what we can to save Christmas. People are dying, but they seem far away. On the radio the premier says “my friends, my friends, my friends,” over and over and over again on weekday afternoons, and I wonder if this is what it was like in wartime.

It is like this, too:

I miss going to the movies, the particular bounce of the chairs, the hope and grandeur of previews, the air-conditioning on hot days. I miss working in coffee shops, the squeal and hiss of the machines, the way the sun comes in the windows in the mornings. I miss bars, and malls, and my cubicle at work. I miss the subway. I miss being in audiences. I miss menus. I miss cooking for friends. I miss never knowing what background music to put on when company comes over. I miss running my hands over sweaters in the store. I miss running quick errands on my way home. I miss not knowing what “super spreader events” and “anti-mask rallies” are. I miss anonymity; I miss who I was, and wasn’t, in a crowd. I miss more things than I can remember. I miss all the ease of coming and going, trying and wandering—an ease I sort of knew I had, but couldn’t really understand.

And it is like this most powerfully of all:

The impossible ache of a missing hug, the gap in farewell where touch should be.

In January I was at a birthday party with 80 other people. Already that was the end of something. On March 13 I hugged my friend goodbye—“are we still doing that?” his partner asked from the other side of the room—and I did not touch another human body again for six-and-a-half months. This is not an experiment I recommend. It is sort of like when you haven’t eaten any vegetables or slept or bathed properly throughout a whole exam period, and you’re not going to die or anything but you just disintegrate a bit, only in this case it goes on and on and on and you can’t just buy a salad, you more or less need a friend to break the rules or a stranger from the internet to fall in love with you.

I am flooded with my usual desperate longing to cry out two things at once: I am one of the most independent people you will meet! and Please don’t let me disappear! Pandemic dynamics distort the old discomfort of this tension, which I am as used to wearing as my skin. It’s hard to know whether pain is better if everyone is feeling it, or worse. Most days I think, I am tired of being “in this together.” I want my own story back.

I want to say: please don’t forget about the single people. The people who live alone. I hear how hard it is to be a parent, a partner, a front-line worker, a member of a vulnerable population. I hear you, I really do, and I know how lucky I am. My privilege is staggering. My freedom is unthinkable. We’re all in this together and we’re not together at all, and I’m not really sure what that means on a grand scale, but from my little corner of this hurting, bewildered world I just want to say:

I can’t remember what it’s like to hear another person breathing next to me.

They say we are grieving what could have been, the selves we could have become over these last seven months. I don’t know if it’s grief, but I’m obsessed with this thought: seven months ago I was seven months younger. Being in one’s thirties is about learning that age has consequences, and being in a pandemic is about learning that lockdowns devour time. Spiky little coronavirus particles are out there devastating people’s lungs and I am not allowed to touch anyone except my cats, and somehow—how can this be?—my uterus is becoming more geriatric by the day. Parenthood is not really something I think about or feel ready for but this dilemma, my decaying reproductive system, has turned into a focal point for my own personal fury about the virus’s indiscriminate thievery of time.

And so it is like this: waiting, waiting, bored and tired, often grateful, usually capable, sometimes hopeless, still the self I always am just confined, impatient, trying not to eat too much or ask too much of anyone. Everything is different, and nothing has changed at all.

A spider has created one of those gauzy nest-webs above my office doorway. Perhaps there will be a colony in here by spring. The other morning I taught a class at my desk, talking to 18 sleepy teenagers on the other side of the internet and to one spider, here, with me, running laps in the lamplight. When I pad across the living room mid-morning to wash out my coffee mug in the kitchen, the cat is stretched in a square of sunshine on the floor, and looks at me with wet, comfortable eyes that say, you again. A man on the corner plays the same five songs on his tin whistle over and over, day after day, “Imagine” and “The Sound of Silence,” earnest and out of tune.

One night I heard a flower fall from a bush in the dark. There was a tiny, tired whoosh and plop. In my throat, in the aftermath, my breath caught like a gasp.

*The title of this piece comes from a wonderful blog post by Carrie Snyder, which you can read here.