I Don’t Know How To Pandemic

April 13 – I don’t know how to pandemic. I don’t know how not to feel guilty about having a job while almost everyone around me has become unemployed. I don’t know how to be a good partner, or a good daughter, or a good employee, or even a good friend. I don’t know how to be a writer. I read and consume and watch passively and I don’t know how to be productive, or rest. I  don’t know what to do with the news of hundreds of thousands of deaths and the clean air. I want to curl up in a ball and cry and feel like a victim. I want to embrace my loneliness and love myself with all of my being; instead I obsess over every little thing. I undo my bed and make sure the sheets are stretched as far as possible. I obsessively count calories, and guesstimate how many days my scented candle will last. I obsess over how many days worth of food I have in the fridge, and how little steps I’ve taken in the last 5 days.

I obsess over dust and clean windows. I obsess over how often I shower and what time I sent my last text. I feel like the ghost of my former self and time is slipping through my fingers. I’m not present and I feel paralyzed by fear. The fear of losing control and of a new normal. The fear of gaining weight. I hate myself for thinking about my weight when people are dying all over the world. I indulge in rich foods and owe myself hunger for the next day.

April 15 –  I put some art up. I suppose I got tired of staring into the off-white, bare walls of my room. Naturally my gaze pierced past infinity, to where my anxiety was more accessible than it had been. A mismatch of my favorite paintings who all had a place in my old home, now enrich the place with splashes of color. Paintings borrowed from a distant past. The life that now seems like a myth – did it ever happen? It feels like a book I may have left unfinished in a previous life.

Coming up on two years since I’ve called this shared, tiny apartment “home”. A bed I’ve stumbled upon late most nights after violently revenging my lonely married days. Never having the lights on for long enough that the bare walls would matter – sometimes from a late work night, sometimes drinks and food with friends, a writing class here and there. I’ve counted 15 steps from the edge of my bed to the farthest point in the apartment I can walk to. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, …. 15.

Half a step from my bed to my work desk. maybe 5 to my door.

April 20 – my loneliness is comfortable and smells like strawberry sorbet and black coffee. It’s a view that’s 90% obstructed by a 4-story car park. And a little tree outside of my window, blooming. My heart sinks thinking about going back to normal. I’ve become one with my room. Everything is precisely where it is supposed to be, just like me.

April 23rd – I think it might be the art. It’s less lonely here now. There’s the painting of a little girl in a yellow raincoat and pigtails, holding an umbrella next to a tiger wearing a bow-tie and a top hat.

There’s photos of my friends, and a couple of pieces of Persian calligraphy done by my best friend. And music. Always music. There’s also sleep and nightmares. Waves of sadness triggered by a song I’ve listened to countless times. There’s the virtual everything’s. And I just ride the waves. Up one minute, making food in the kitchen and dancing, and down the next, feeling lonelier than I ever have – unloved.

There’s the hashtags and the “we’re all in this together ” messages. But we’re not. 15 steps from the edge of my bed to the farthest point of my apartment. There’s my single bed with 2 pillows: one to prop my head up and one to hold while I fall asleep listening to the same story about lavender fields in a little town in southern France. “Blue Gold”.

May 1st. This morning, more than anything else in the entire world, my heart longed for a walk on Queen street. If you’re an immigrant or have ever moved from one home to another, you know the yearning: not exactly an ache, but a tug in your heart, a skip of a beat that makes you miss a place so dearly. I went for a walk and broke in my old shoes again – taking pictures of everything I walked by. “We’re supposed to document it all”, I keep thinking. I should be writing. Something about hope, and flowers blooming in this beautiful spring day, and life moving on without us and all the lessons we can learn and what stories we will tell our children.

Loving me during a pandemic is draining. I obsess over Time. “This many weeks since I’ve seen my parents”. “This many days working from home. This many days since our last sleepover… last year on this day I was… today’s the anniversary of….” I’m sorry I don’t know how to pandemic and for thinking that it is anyone else’s job (but myself) to make me feel better and reassure me about the world. You see, I’ve always played this role myself, and sometimes I forget that you can’t be me, for me. I lived with a man who’s emotional burden was too heavy for me to carry. Living with him, I never had a chance with my own baggage. How I felt or what I needed was always secondary to his needs. His anxiety consumed my life and I had to practice breathing in secret. I forgot about me until I left.

And now there’s too much of myself in this room. The burden is precisely as heavy as I can bare to carry it. I may not know how to pandemic but I know how to practice breathing in secret. And I’ve learned more than anyone else how to be alone.