#and other undiagnosed issues that were probably half the reason you felt so isolated in your high school experience. thanks to bad parents

[adustoflove]

I always think well if I dated a man, I wouldn't feel as insane. I wouldn't feel so awful or jealous. And then I remember why I came to the conclusion that I'm a lesbian. I just wouldn't care if it were a man. I just can't bring myself to care about men like that 😔😩😭

[bisongrass]

March 15, 2020

I stand over the sink, rotating the bar of soap between my hands, counting the rotations, one per second. I watch a grey lather form and drop into the sink. Satisfying. I do this at least a dozen times a day. I no longer find impatience while I wait for the count of twenty. I’ve slowed by at least this much.

There are certain events that beckon me to write, but this one, the time of COVID-19, is not one of them. Nonetheless, it does feel to me as if the world has shifted in some deeply significant way and I worry that, when this is all over, I won’t have a record of how it felt to live through it; we will be swimming in an exhausting number of think pieces about isolation and leisure and our connection to the natural world and whatnot, but there won’t be a daily record, just a sense of how it felt be in this time and place. The think piece is the product of a fast-moving, click-starved media landscape, and while that still goes on -- the churn on Twitter right now is no doubt more manic than ever -- there is, at the same time, this real-life enforced respite whose impacts I can already feel, even though I’ve only been self-isolating for two days. 

The week was stressful though. I have been contending with a flare-up of whatever my undiagnosed mysterious GI issue is -- some sort of disturbance in the biome, I suspect, which caused, for weeks on end, a panoply of symptoms, including some ones that were new to me -- a pain beneath my solar plexus that felt like the presence of a malevolent, toothed, spherical creature straining to chew its way out; an alien that, in my most delerious, middle-of-the-night moments, seemed like a manifestation or echo of whatever imbalance had ravaged the globe. 

For reasons that weren’t clear to me, and were perhaps not clear to many, people began stockpiling groceries on Wednesday. Photographs and reports of empty shelves and long line-ups began to filter up through social media, making me wonder what these hoarders knew that I did not. But even if they knew nothing, they were nonetheless creating a situation where, when I finally did need to pick up some canned tomatoes or whatever, there would be nothing left, and so I, too, was driven to purchase more than I usually would. Panic-buying begets panic-buying.

Even though there were no carts left when I entered the store, not even a free basket, the mood was surprisingly relaxed  -- more of a snow-day feel than anything else. I shared a laugh with a woman as we both surveyed the empty shelves where toilet paper should have been. “It’s so silly,” she said. On the bottom shelf, there was still a lot of “Caboo” brand TP -- I had no idea people were so suspicious of bamboo fibre. 

Lineups extended down the grocery aisles to the back of the store, but I didn’t sense a lot of impatience.

I was interested to see what had been picked over the most: cans of beans, cans of tuna, soymilk. Rice. The Dr Oetker’s “spinaci” flavoured frozen pizza was sold out -- if you know, you know. Frozen peas -- that is a nonsense purchase. No one eats those. But they were gone.

The girl who rang through my groceries was young, with long hair, and a gold ring on one finger, and I remembered my own jobs as a teenager working with massive, frenzied lines (TIFF, where people literally became violent, sometimes, in line) and I hoped she was staying safe, sanitizing her hands a lot.

I’ve gone for a lot of walks. The streets are quieter, like Christmas morning, but with less traffic; the skies are quieter still. I always half-register the sound of passenger planes flying overhead. That has diminished considerably. I read about how NASA saw greenhouse gas emissions in China dropped drastically during the outbreak. I think about how Nepal closed Mount Everest, how St Mark’s Square in Venice has been deserted, and I think about how the earth must feel -- how free, how light, how relieved. We will start the human churn right back up again when this is done -- and knowing that this respect for the planet can be achieved, even accidentally, and we choose not to is incredibly depressing to me. At the same time, I dream of seeing Venice this way, hushed, in rain and fog, empty, the noise of a single tread of footfalls echoing between stone buildings in narrow alleyways, the quiet, everywhere lapping of water finally audible, and I see how this impulse is that tourist greed, the longing for an unforgettable, “exotic” experience. 

I meet friends, sometimes. I miss existing in the presence of humans, miss having my existence visibly acknowledged. We stay away from each other -- we wave hello and goodbye, and I realize how much I miss the smallest contact, just that hug of greeting and farewell. I comment to a stranger how good-looking their dog is, a drive-by compliment, from a distance, probably spurred on by a need for incidental closeness, incidental warmth. The dog thinks about barking at me, but doesn’t.