"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young person stuck in quarantine, must be in want of a blog--"
There's something I want to get straight as I launch this blog/portfolio/experiment into the atmosphere... it's not a product of the coronavirus. Sure, you'd be forgiven for thinking that because, amidst* the rising death toll and falling morale, there has also been a rise in blogs. Or, at the minimum, blog length Facebook posts about people finding their creativity whilst trapped indoors. (If I had a penny for every time I've been told Shakespeare wrote King Lear in isolation, I might be able to afford to fly back to Canada once this is all over.) However, this endeavour (and yes, I'm going to call it an endeavour because I'm nothing if not dramatic) is something I've been meaning to get around to for a while.
In the future when I'm sat in an interview for some high-paying (fingers crossed) job at a magazine, and they ask why I want to write for them, or how do I stand out from the crowd, I want to be able to point at something and say ta-da! This is what I'm going to point at (unless I give up on it in a few weeks, we'll see) and they will be blown away by the dedication and the prolificness and the... pizzazz I have shown here. That's the plan at least.
The fruition of my ta-da! portfolio coincides with the 2020 lockdown, but it really is only a coincidence. Am I still going to take the opportunity to add my own take about the whole thing to the pile though? You bet!
It started as a joke, memes shared amongst friends, and then descended into what we're living with today. I remember sitting in the dining hall in Canada at the start of the year, dismissing it as a risk. Now I'm coming to the end of my self-isolation period in England, having booked a flight home the minute airline companies started cancelling them. Oh, how the tables turned.
I don't feel guilty for dismissing it at first. Optimism is not a bad thing, especially in the face of adversity. How was I, a 20 year-old English student, distracted by the ups and downs of a year abroad, meant to know what the world had in store for us? I reacted to the information as I received it and everyone was downplaying it at first -- hell, some governments (looking at you, Downing Street) still are.
Most of what I'm feeling, in truth, is hard to pinpoint. The cabin fever is helped by the fact I can open a sliding door everyday and sunbathe in the warm pool it creates on the carpet. I'm also self-isolated with one of my best friends, who can make everything feel a little bit better with one badly timed dad joke. The all-encompassing, soul-crushing fear of this being a never ending, unsolvable problem is eased by completely immersing myself in the dumbest, funnest, and sexiest shows available to me: The Witcher and The Vampire Diaries. Even WrestleMania has proven its worth as escapism today. The fleeting bursts of hope that it will be over soon are always swiftly crushed by the incompetence of a government who can't quite get a handle on the figures they keep announcing. The stress of looming deadlines and exams has always been a constant, because I always leave everything to the last minute anyway -- global pandemic or not -- so I feel I have a pretty good hold on this one already. The "play dead" reaction my body is having because I can neither fight it nor flee from it is okay because I am well-practiced in the art of lazing on the sofa all day.
So... everything comes and goes, the tide washing in and out, stress followed by laughter followed by boredom followed by insanity followed by I-can't-believe-Damon-just-did-that. Really, the only constant is the absolute longing I feel to be outside.
My 19th birthday was spent trekking from Sophia Gardens to Cardiff Bay to Penarth Pier and I ended the day with a sunburnt chest and a sugar rush from all the ice cream. A year later I was shrieking into the freezing cold water at West Wittering and then kicking around a football on the sand whilst the single-use BBQ smoked. My plans this year involved crossing the border into America, hiking in upstate New York and ending the day getting pretty smashed at an Olive Garden.
Now, it looks as if it'll be a day of Zoom parties and (fingers crossed) a Colin the Caterpillar cake... indoors.
Missing out on Olive Garden's breadsticks is disappointing. Not being allowed to leave the house? Devastating.
I feel a great closeness right now to the angel in the statue. I found her in the summer of 2018 and she lives in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome, eternally trapped in the darkness of her arms. Around her, the cemetery blooms with pink blossoms and stray cats. She can't see any of it. I'm trapped (not eternally but, see: dramatic) in the darkness of the constant indoors. Outside, spring has sprung and I am forbidden from enjoying it.
I miss "unfenced existence". The poets would say I'm yearning and, since I'm a wannabe poet, I'll admit it -- I am yearning. I don't mind staying indoors because it is the right thing to do and I'm not about to endanger the lives of others just because I want to sunbathe. I miss it though. Enough to wax lyrical about it, as you can see.
What I'm trying to do though, is be grateful for it. (Trying is definitely the operative word.) What I figure is that now I've missed it so much, I will never take it for granted again. I'll stop saying no to a bike ride along the seafront with my mum or a hike into the Brecon Beacons with my dad. A quick trip to the corner shop will be a privilege! (That last one will last a week but the rest of it stands.) And, hopefully, the rest of the world will start to be grateful for it too.
Littering? A thing of the past! Fracking? An old mistake! Politicians being controlled by oil companies who continuously cause more damage to the environment than any individual? We've moved on now! Single-use plastics? Unnecessary plastic packaging? Majority meat diets? Projects which cut into the countryside and disrupt local habitats? All done with!
Of course, this won't happen. But -- hopefully our collective yearning to be outside in nature because we've been forced away from it so long will make room for some changes. For the better. I don't want things to go back to normal, because normal wasn't good enough.
This mentality extends beyond nature too. Hopefully politicians across the world act upon the praise they've given to key workers who, a few months ago, were the most mistreated in society. Bin men, cashiers, delivery drivers (et al.) should be lifted up alongside the medical workers and all of them should be paid what they are due. Health care should be revised, funding for the arts (if you've read a book or watched a film during the quarantine then, hello!) should be increased, unions should be the norm... COVID-19 might be devastating us right now but I do have a gut-feeling that we'll come out of it better.
Not because we will merely survive -- because we will force ourselves, and everyone around us, to do better.
Should I leave you with a poorly done, pretty mushy allegory? I think I will. Right now, we're the angel slumped in sorrow, and darkness blinds us. We can't see it but, behind us, in our future, waits the clear, blue sky. Free from clouds and promising more. (The more being universal health care, community over capitalism, and a free vaccination providing immunisation against COVID-19.)
Having thought about it, I've remembered the book I'm meant to have read for one of my courses contains a pretty neat and relevant quote! I think it would be a better place to end. (And maybe it will prove that I have learnt the best way to end an article, even though this is arguably a blog post not an article and it doesn't contain an interview either. Still.) It's from Babs the Impossible by Sarah Grand and, if you have the time (that's a joke because, obviously, like me, you probably do) you should read it. It's good. Here's the feeling I feel when I sit by the open window and judge the runners going by, all of us underneath the great sky, and the feeling I can't wait to feel again when I'm back out there:
"There was included in the limitless expanse all that makes life lovely here, while in the mystery of its blue distances, in its immensity, were suggestions of the infinite, and of that which argues in us for something beyond our finite faculties and for eternity."
05/04/20
*Proof that I'm keeping up with journalistic trends!
The picture is of graffiti on a wall and the translation is: "We can't return to normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the problem."
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