The Alchemy of Quarantine

 

Sitting beneath the locust tree, she resembled a sacred fruit fallen from a branch. Today she was reading from a collection of poems. Whenever her hand turned a page, you wanted to do the same.

                            --From Cousin K by Yasmina Khadra

There are deep-voiced people mumbling in the alley outside of my bedroom, and the faint buzz of the electricity in my house around me. One ear is trained on the deep bursts of laughter and occasional breaking bottle, the other trained upon almost-invisible sounds. I can feel the inside of my ear twitch when any of the sounds require too much concentration. 

I've hit another period of accidentally shattering multiple light bulbs (two today) and, unrelated, finding mystery cuts on my fingers (today I thought I had red ink on the pinky and index fingers of my left hand, but it turned out to be blood). 

It's been a strange weekend within a strange time. 

One year and two months into a pandemic and it makes sense that there is a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula randomly on my bathroom floor that no one is reading, and that I have taken to drinking maté out of the shot glass I used to use for the Ouija board. 

I've been thinking a lot about vulnerability as of late, and the inadvertent secrecy that can occur when one is less vulnerable than they arguably should be. 

More importantly, perhaps, I have been thinking so much about how, in this moment when people are more isolated than usual, we are possibly getting stranger yet more open to vulnerability (even if it feels forced). 

I'm wondering how this period of time has shifted people's relationships with their loved ones, and how this intersects with vulnerability. I'm wondering how it has shifted their relationship to their neighbors. Or to the familiar faces they were used to seeing throughout their day that they no longer see. 

It's strange to feel the need to be distant when around sometimes hundreds of people in protests. 

It's a strange feeling to re-learn the pattern of interactive communication in the three dimensional world with people outside of one's "pod" and sometimes, even within it. 

I've been reading a lot. 

Sometimes, while my eyes are floating over the words, they catch on a stripe of sunlight that has cut across the page. I feel my eyes consider it in a different way. Study it across the parchment. Sometimes, my eyes well up while they follow this solar intrusion. And I wonder if that, too, is a product of the moment that we are living in.

Be well; be loved,

k.

(image: from a tumblr whose name escapes me. Damn it all.)