What should I wear to the living room today?
Photo by Old Youth on Unsplash
My fridge just groaned, rolled their eyes, and hissed at me: “Not You again!”. Ignoring it’s remarks , I picked up by peanut butter bottle for the third time in past four hours and slammed the door on it’s face. Having been engaged and quarantined to my laptop since past six months, I returned back to my partner’s side and start clicking it’s button to type-
There are mornings when I open my eyes and for a moment it feels like a different sun has risen in the sky. It gleams behind the determinedly drawn curtains of my room. If I lie very still, it’s still be there. How wonderful it is, new sun shining upon a world struck with disease.
I tread carefully those days, trying very hard not to upset the new scheme of things. We have a new sun, everything is okay, do u know how rarely such miracles happen in real life? Very rarely it turns out , because just then , my mom screams and it’s my cue to wake up. The real world with it’s sad , sick sun , waiting to melt everyone except the virus, awaits.
Physically , I am here ,in October , studying from home, where studying seems more like study+dying. Mentally, I am in March , standing outside my college gate , waiting for my roommates to come out so that we can go back to room, chatting and walking .
I can visualize it, my college building. I can see the the trees around it and I remember the ‘Girls Hostel’, just opposite to the college where we used to whine after 8 pm as the gates got closed. Lesser did we know , it could happen for months to us to be locked inside our homes when it is 8am or 8pm, doesn’t matter !
Now as I sit, writing in my room with the door tightly shut because there are too many people in the house, I am unable to recall the name of the café where I spent approximately every evening of my life. Café Espresso. Took me thirty seconds to get the name! See, this is what the pandemic is doing .No, it’s not playing mind games , that’s too cliché and where’s the fun in that. This is something different. This is a new kind of scary , mysterious and exciting. It’s like rambling speech — Stay home, stay safe, wear a mask , carry a sanitizer- stuck inside your head like an annoying post-it.
The day I write this is nearly after seven- month anniversary of my life in lockdown. The days pass in flavorless haze and the nights are still restless. Sleep eludes me and I am tired ,all the time. One would say Virgos are creatures of routine and perfection but not so much when a pandemic has struck, no. I wake up when I wake up, I sleep when I sleep .Everything in between , that’s my routine.
There must be a theory about adapting things as they are, because in the beginning , it felt like it wasn’t real. back then, it felt more like a time-out situation , uncertain but tolerable .I remember the first experimental lockdown on Sunday 22, march, when chirping of birds seemed all new. No one drove their bikes and cars by our house, nobody honked and the vegetable vendor woke me up by shouting out the prices of potatoes and onions. And then, just one day after the things got real. On 24 March 2020, Pm announced a 21 day lockdown resulting in a complete mayhem , the effects and consequences of which would cripple us for months.
Slowly and unwillingly, I adapt to the change. I train my brain to read PDF’s of newly released books, on the bed, on the couch, sometimes in the balcony. But that too seems too hard. Clicking on the LIKE and FOLLOW button of the meme pages seems to be my finger’s all day job. I’ve started reading tweets more keenly than books, they make more sense to me. The other day , someone tweeted: “It’s okay to not feel okay….” At once I decided to frame the line and mount it on the wall on my bed. Did I do it? Guess you will never know.
It’s a strange feeling, these past seven months . I want to meet people but I don’t want to meet people. I want to talk but I end up texting. The pandemic has physically distanced us from our near and dear ones. It’s a mandate and therefore, we don't like it. Quite like the state of affairs in this country . But it has not in any way restricted communication, and yet I hesitate. communicating via Instagram stories seems easier. You see my story , I see yours. occasionally I send you an emoji , it is my way of making up for the missed calls.
Thankfully, out of nowhere my hand hit the peanut butter bottle that has been emptied by me and I got up to slam my fridge’s door again and also select my outfit that I will be wearing to the living room today !
