So here we are in lockdown 6.0 Part 2.
I say part 2 because it was originally meant to be for one week and it’s been extended to two weeks.
This time around, I can’t tell how others are feeling but I have a feeling of resignation on a lot of things. As each lockdown is announced, the phone pings in with messages of people rearranging schedules and making changes and once again, I sigh deeply and keep thinking over and over:
“Just bide your time, hang in there, this too will pass”.
The days go by painfully slow as they always do. The only arrangement I have is to meet every week with my friend Marilyn to go for our walk which is something I look forward to. I am also calling the parents every few days to act as a happy-cheerleader to at least not to make them worry about me. At times, I have to urge them to meet me at a park at a halfway point just to get them out of the house.
I’ve reached a point of resignation. It is what it is. Everyone I know seems to be shrinking into their shell. Cloistered into their homes.
I’ve done my duty and am now fully vaccinated. I bluntly tell any friends and family to get vaccinated as my level of tolerance for their excuses and hesitation has disappeared. I’m getting worried that I’m too comfortable at home now and it worries me.
Last night I dreamt that I was at a place like Anne Frank’s hidden room behind the book case. I dreamt that I pulled aside the bookshelf to reveal a room that I was going to spend 4 years of my life in there. I started to panic and kept saying “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I need to be outside!” I asked someone if I could leave my room and they said that I can do so at my own risk and it would have to be at night because the neighbours may find out. I looked outside into the yard from the window and saw high rise appartments surrounding the yard of this house and I woke up with a start with tears in my eyes and taking deep breaths.
It’s strange how all this is affecting us. I feel changed. It’s definitely changed me. I feel like nothing I do really is of any value anymore – what’s the point of doing it? Who really cares about it? In the grand scheme of things it changes nothing.
In some weird twist of irony, I watch YouTube videos of Europeans out and about on their holidays travelling in-between countries and it seems that I’m in an altered reality. Inside watching their travel videos. Then I remind myself of the character from dystopic novel Ready Player One where everyone is stuck inside their homes glued to their virtual reality world because the world outside is not a place you’d want to be in and I’m struck as to how true this is becoming for us. Staying at home is becoming too comfortable and it’s making me worried.
I never saw a life for me where much of it was interacting on a screen and it concerns – and scares me.
This is not a life I want.
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