Have you found the words yet? I don't even mean the right words, but good enough ones to wrap your mind around the contour of the experience, to tentatively feel its jagged edges, roughly intuiting its dimensions?
I haven't. Embarrassing, I know.
When you are known in your circle for your love of scribbling, people assume you spend your life perched over experience with your pen in the air, poised to write it all down.
"Are you writing about it? You must write about it, surely !" people advised, asked, admonished or cooed, sounding baffled when I confessed that I haven't, I couldn't. Because what is 'it', in this case? How can you write about it if you can't name it? There are no words yet.
Okay, here are some words, if you insist . Not the definitive account for all times, not the official Covid Chronicle of this spring without humans, but some scattered impressions of what it has been like for me.
Let's deal with the big ticket item first. Once singing Italians on balconies gave way to clapping Brits on doorsteps constant, large scale, unrelenting death stopped being tragic and grotesque and became strangely normalised, becalmed, discussed in reasonable BBC-like cadences, anaesthetised if you will, ventilated with facts which turned out to be mostly lies, which in turns generated fortifying, morale-rousing indignation.
It's as if, and I am fully aware of how crazy this will sound, but bear with me, it's as if actual people stopped dying once they were dying in their thousands. They were counted, not named, then weighted not counted, and then they disappeared not just from the drone-patrolled streets and squares, the empty stadiums, shopping malls and theatres, the goat infested high streets and dolphin ridden canals but from the news itself, slipping like sand grains through the fingers of my comprehension, leaving a burnt residue, an aftertaste of sadness.
Only one death became suddenly and disconcertingly real. My father's passing more than a year ago was, in pandemic-shaped retrospect, idyllically peaceful. We held his hand to the last. There was a huge, lovely funeral. People could hug and everything. But I find I can't stop thinking, dreaming and crying about him.
Compared to many, to most, I've had a lovely indoor holiday, unmarred by illness or scarcity or real fear. Yet the lack of agency engendered by the lock-down leaked a soporific poison into my mind and body.
I slept well, mostly, but dreaded waking up to another empty, sunny day of lavish pink blossoms exploding unobserved by human eyes. It felt to me at times as if my husband and I had already died and were starring in our own version of The Good Place, against a backdrop of pastel coloured nothingness without end. What was the point again?
I got sick of staring at fuzzy people on screens. I felt a ghost in other people's machine on video calls where my greying hair and proliferating chins distracted me from the conversation. Audio calls and texts felt less fraught, less dangerously intimate. I wanted to be in touch, to feel connected but with no homeschooling of non-existent children to contend with and no job to go to I had less and less to say. I could not read more than a page or two of any novel I started - although I listened to a few while walking obsessively in the park - and if i could no longer read or write or take pleasure in my friends who was I really? Where was I? When would I get myself back?
As my world shrunk to my square I got to know my neighbours really well. I'd always vaguely known them and mostly vaguely liked them but in truth they were a blur in the busyness of my life in the beforetimes.
Now, after months of ordering and distributing the shopping of several elderly residents I've come to actually love them with the love you can only feel when you come to know someone by the quality and rhythm of their most personal purchases, the only choices we each had left.
They ran the full gamut of western styles of consumption, from the bachelor surviving on sliced white bread and canned tuna to the health conscious hemp oil and kefir aficionado, to the flour obsessed couple next door whose asks became more and more war time-like as the weeks passed. Powdered mustard, anyone? Tinned beetroot?
Disconcertingly, no one over-seventy seemed to ever need toilet paper, of which there was a lively Whatsapp trade in the early stages among the under-forty with children. The most vulnerable seemed, by and large, the least afraid, serenely weeding, digging and planting for Britain in their tiny back gardens with their radios on.
No longer in a hurry, I was the one dropping by at their doorstep hoping for a chat, jumping at the chance to dispose of their recyclables, collect their medicines and help them organise octogenarian socially distanced birthdays.
I don't know what the future holds. No shit, right? But seriously, I have no sense of what I'll do, who I'll be for the rest of my life. This much I know in my bones: this thing we are going through and hopefully emerging from, this thing there are no proper words for yet will not have been a momentary pause, a punctuation mark. It will turn out to be the end of a whole chapter, the start perhaps of a whole new book.
I can't simply pick up from where I left off and carry on, because I myself was in limbo, in transition, when everything stopped and the past now seems too remote to have ever been real and the future impossible to imagine.
All I know is that I do want to wake up most mornings these days, and hope to soon find out.
