I have spent a great deal of time attempting to manage my
feelings and not enough trying to understand them. I have, at different points
in my life, experienced all the various emotions resulting from common life
events: love, failure, relationship breakdown, bereavement. Then the world was hit by a global pandemic.
An unprecedented event for myself - and for a whole generation. My immediate reaction was the same as most people’s. Surprise, incredulity, fear – for myself, my parents, my friends. Panic, conspiracies, self-medicating. Exactly what I would expect from it.
An unprecedented event for myself - and for a whole generation. My immediate reaction was the same as most people’s. Surprise, incredulity, fear – for myself, my parents, my friends. Panic, conspiracies, self-medicating. Exactly what I would expect from it.

I have caught myself swimming against inexplicable waves of
excitement and adrenaline since this tragedy started. I felt flushes of shame
running through me as I grabbed large bags of pasta from the supermarket
shelves and stocked up on canned goods and frozen vegetables. It’s not
panic-buying if you do it gracefully, I told myself. It symptomised my fears in
a way that was too disconcertingly obvious. The overflowing cupboards quickly turned into a manifestation of my weakness.
But I choose to feel like a hero instead. I convinced myself
I was a little soldier on a mission to find food and hand-sanitiser to protect
myself and my friends from an invisible enemy. Life as I knew it came to a
halt, but I kept going. I sat at the back of an empty bus, facing the rear
window, monitoring the paralysis of the city as the familiar landscape became
wider and clearer in my reverse journey to work.
I contemplated the stillness. It was all I ever wanted. The
pandemic fulfilled my dreams of control, placated my torrential possessiveness,
humoured my unreasonable reluctance to share the place I love with the millions
of people that make it great.

I woke up one morning in mid-March and I looked out the
living room window while I sipped on a bad cup of coffee. My gaze rested on the
usually busy street in east London that seemed to have slept through the alarm.
The shutters were down. An old man walked his dog in a solitary act of
defiance. The people that usually cram the streets and the shops and the cafes
became faceless silhouettes, the plots of their lives unfolded between walls
and behind windows, acting out scenes of forced domesticity while stuck in an
endless Sunday afternoon.
It was a strange sensation that quickly turned into yet
another self-serving narrative of triumph. I became convinced that my newfound
sense of calm within the storm hailed from the feeling that while the rest of
the world was plunged into hysteria, little had changed for me. I live in a
permanent state of crisis, and now the rest of the world is beginning to catch
up. But I have home court advantage; chaos is familiar territory. Everyone is
struggling to stay afloat. But I’m levitating.
I am still gripped by fear, of course. Two, maybe three times a day. But it’s no different from the anguish that envelops me in more peaceful times. It’s not paralysing. Clarity is the gift of this quiet war that is being fought in every household, a battle where soldiers wear surgical masks and civilians protect each other by refusing to touch.

We are still at the initial stage and I - like everyone else
- am still learning to navigate the intricacies of the new world, to understand
its rules and their effect on me and the people I love. I repeat the same
actions: shower, work, food, vodka. I keep reliving the same day and, when I’m
not, I replay the hours and the minutes in my head, trying to make sense of the
feeling of trepidation you experience when you’re waiting for something, but
you can’t tell what.
What am I waiting for? For this to end? But the end’s not in
sight. Am I expecting to get sick? Most likely. Am I waiting for the next wave
to hit so that I can rise to the occasion? I’m not sure. I go from hypochondria
to recklessness. I try to play God - but the shoes don’t fit.
I began to feel safe in the predictable emptiness of the
city. A deadly virus circulated in the air, but I felt sheltered from the
things and people that hurt me in the past. I was still part of life but I
remained separate from the people I feared and only observed them from afar, as
part of the theatre of shadows happening behind closed doors. Their lives are
frozen in time - and therefore they can’t be more successful than me, or more
lovable. They can’t hurt me again deliberately or indirectly with their
arrogant displays of ordinary triumph.
The other day I jumped into a taxi to go back home after
work. I left Westminster, the red zone of the pandemic - and my life. We drove
past the Southbank, through Tower Hill and Whitechapel, all the way to Hackney,
where I live.
The roads were clear - with the exception of a double-decker
bus and a couple of joggers. I rested my head on the window. Contemplating the
fleeting feeling of tranquillity, a self-congratulatory response to my ability
to adjust in the new reality, and occasionally thrive because of it.
The frail sense of peace came tumbling down when I spotted a
familiar face in a familiar place. The two things didn’t belong to each other
and the added value of their combined familiarity was lost on me. It was a
sensation of calculated shock, an abrupt interruption of my false sense of
security. It highlighted the inadequacy of my struggles to isolate myself from
invisible dangers. It’s how I assume I would feel if, after months spent trying
to avoid sickness, the test came back positive.
An apparition, the spectre of past love and present sorrow.
And I saw it. You know it might happen, but you never think it will happen to
you. The passing of time decelerated as I turned my head to make out the shape
of a ghost in a ghost town. Flushes of memory-induced agony run through my
body, an old fever that hasn’t left me since my system was contaminated by an
invisible curse that sucks the air out of my lungs. I avoided contact but I
still got sick. I tried to flatten the curve, to cough it out, but I just
tripped on it as I stepped into the next wave of the crisis. Reality doesn’t
keep a safe distance. It will hit you, invade you and shake you into
consciousness until the fairytales you tell yourself to survive are exposed as
pathetic lies.
I sat in the car, petrified. Driving past the manifestation
of my disease. I was tempted to yell at the driver, ask him to pull the brake,
slip out of the car with my bags and my baggage, and run towards it, tired of
avoiding it. I want to push my luck, see if I’ll survive or finally die from
it.
But much like the city, I remained still. The voices on the
radio became muffled whispers as the driver and I took a U-turn into my
personal hell. And there I was again, casualty of a pandemic of the soul: I put
myself in lockdown, a modern form of emotive self-exile, but it did little to
ease the waves of disquiet pushing through my body.
The months spent sanitising my
capacity for feeling were not enough to protect me from the dire revelation
that while the disease may be dormant, it’s still there, in the shape of a
phantom standing in the middle of the road, waiting to cross. I got close, but
I escaped it. I chose to avoid it. We took opposite directions. I went towards
my home and, once again, it walked away from me. But I no longer feel
safe.
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