It had been hours since I moved.
Sitting on an exercise ball—something I had read online (or maybe interpreted from something I skimmed online) that helps your core and your posture, but honestly it just felt better than my hard chair because I would sink into the combination of air and rubber, still firm enough to support me, and I could just stay seated, staring at my laptop or out the window, with its iron bars resembling a jail cell, past my front yard, with its dying trees in the autumn afternoon light, toward the sidewalk, and I didn’t feel the need to move, just sitting and staring (and possibly exercising), and abs would just be a plus at this point—I had finished work for the day (not that work these days ever felt truly over, as emails would pop up throughout the night and either the urgency of the message or the boredom of having nothing else to do would lend itself to responding immediately, because the world hadn’t truly stopped moving even if the people in it had, at least physically).
And as I passively exercised, I felt stuck.
Always just sitting and staring.
I could’ve called someone (maybe Kevin?), but who would pick up?
Honestly, these days, how could anyone prioritize the problems of someone else—let alone an acquaintance or casual friend or social encounter (someone you bump into at a party and say “Hey! How are you?!” without really meaning it)—over the loneliness and tragedy spilling out of their own home.
We all knew that everyone else was lonely—if not sitting and staring then at least alone in their own homes, alone in a way even with roommates or family or pets or plants—and that we all managed our loneliness with different combinations of introspection and cooking and home workouts (or pretend workouts à la sitting on an exercise ball) and TV and reading (or pretending to read) and new music and old music and cleaning and remembering to clip our toenails and new art projects and online shopping and video conferencing (for work and for fun, although the frequency of the latter declined as the frequency of the former increased) and maybe some sitting and staring (but not as much as I), and it was getting dark now and I still hadn’t moved.
And it’s not that I didn’t want to move.
I had tried to stand earlier—truly an attempt in that I imagined myself standing and walking somewhere, anywhere, but my usual motivators (e.g. bathroom, food, mosquito killing) hadn’t yet appeared and might not for a while—but instead I massaged my right thumb and turned to look out into the hastily falling dusk as the streetlights in their soft amber glow began to illuminate the neighborhood, and occasionally the stray pedestrian would walk by, some in pairs, whereupon I might be able to catch a millisecond’s worth of a conversation (and I knew it was exactly a millisecond, and if not exactly then quite close, because I had done an experiment with Kevin walking past my window, speaking both audibly and slowly, and I in my room texting him that I could only catch words, not whole sentences, but thanking him nonetheless) before the silence resumed.
“… are they just…”
Silence.
And I was left thinking, “Who were they? And what were they just about to do? Or was just more a state of being? Was just the beginning of something permanent? Or was just an emphasis, something to declare incredulity rather than to limit the thing itself, whatever, or whoever, it was? Or did the just highlight that among all the other things that they could do or be, they’re just choosing this one thing? Was this said in judgment? Or in awe? Or in judgmental awe? And if it was either (or neither), could they just circle back and elucidate the scene with a few more well-timed laps around my block? Just so I could listen, to finish out their story, and then they could continue on down to Pennsylvania Avenue or disappear into the Capitol Hill neighborhood.”
While the pedestrians were few and far between, I wondered if they could ever see me staring out into the world from my basement bedroom, a knee-level view of my own secret universe, mask-less and disheveled with a papasan chair under the center bay window next to an A/C unit that’s currently off, a small end table piled with stacks of unopened mail and a tiny reading lamp that often got too hot and threatened to ignite the paper beneath it, a desk at which I currently sat, and then that would be as far as the window’s sight reached (although I imagine that a person lying prone in my front yard could see as far back as my closet, at which point I would be screaming because, wow, what a frightening sight that would be).
My room was otherwise spacious compared to the shoeboxes in which some of my friends used to live (before they all started to make money and either moved above ground or bought property, while I was unable to do either, except it was partially by choice because I quite liked the convenience of my location, and I hadn’t minded the sparse amenities until I was trapped underground for months), although I wouldn’t say my room was particularly well furnished, just the basics—(1) the aforementioned chair, table, lamp, and desk; (2) a nightstand on which stacks of books, ordered by my interest in reading them, collected dust; (3) a bed and bedding in faded hues of gray, green, and pink; (4) a bookshelf built into the brick wall and overstuffed; (5) a closet, also built into the wall, also overstuffed, separated from the room by curtains for my clothing’s privacy; (6) curtains on my windows for my privacy; (7) a TV, long since disconnected from my landlords’ satellite service, perched on a corner of my dresser; (8) an open dresser drawer in which lives a pile of socks and underwear so high that the drawer has never been closed; (9) an ottoman, similarly overflowing with rarely used workout clothes, used instead as a footstool; (10) a footstool that just appeared in my room one day, on which rests another collection of books that I intended to read after the ones on my nightstand, although they too were collecting dust; (11) and my exercise ball—all of which either came with the place when I moved in or were inherited from moving friends, and have existed unchanged in their placements for years, or at least what has felt like years.
But my room is only big enough for one, maybe one-and-a-half, but definitely not two because the Wi-Fi is slow if connected to too many devices (and I have too many devices), and the space heater is only the size of my foot and thus only keeps one foot warm, and I don’t have enough space or patience to fold and put away my jeans so they live permanently on the floor, and after laundry day my mountain of socks and underwear blocks the bottom quarter of my TV, itself surrounded by trinkets and knickknacks and receipts accumulated over the years, so yeah, no, definitely big enough just for one.
Staring at my dresser (or, more specifically, at a stray sock threatening to jump), I stand.
It’s a simple motion and I wonder why it’s taken this long, but here I am, finally standing, reaching toward the sock to tuck it safely back into the pile, and then I pivot and land gracefully backward onto my bed and I lie down, staring at the ceiling, counting the number of mosquito corpses smeared against the white paint, a warning to all the other would-be bloodsuckers (the process is: after being awoken by a shrill buzzing noise close to my ear, and, only once, inside my ear, indicating that a mosquito had invaded my room, I’d turn on a lamp, which directed its light into a corner that then reflected light back into the room, and I’d wait for the little vampire to land on my ceiling, after which I’d crouch under it, taking my time to aim my palm upward, and then I would spring up, striking the pest with my open hand, and then I’d smear its blood, my blood really, creating what looked like mini-murder art), and even though I can count at least three dozen such crime scenes dotting my ceiling, the mosquitos, at their own peril, keep coming.
In my supine state, I contemplate a nap, but I couldn’t justify sleeping at this hour only to try to sleep again in a couple of hours, so I simply scroll through Instagram.
Immediately I recognize it as a mistake.
Instagram is at once both an escape and a trap because I can spend hours upon hours peering into the carefully curated lives of my friends (and some of my favorite brands and organizations and, of course, Taylor Swift), but then I’m just wasting time perusing through other people’s lives at the expense of my own.
Seeing all of my friends (or at least what appears to be all of my friends) with such put-together stories, even in these times, is mostly disheartening, and I want to bless their health but even in their own personal lockdowns they’ve somehow bettered themselves either with an apartment change or by becoming a homeowner, or by running outside and getting uncharacteristically fit (I ran once during a brief summer storm to take a break from my room, and as it poured, I stepped into a pothole filled with water, tripped and stumbled onto the sidewalk, skinned my right knee in the process, and I was so enraged that I walked home, and right as I unlocked my front door, it stopped raining), or by getting engaged, or by learning to bake or cook (I cook, but not well, and I refuse to follow recipes because I don’t particularly like instructions, leading sometimes to over-spiced or over-cooked dishes that are just slightly off but not worth discarding—like the time I accidentally put cumin instead of cinnamon in my chia seed pudding and I convinced myself that it was artisanal and that cumin added a much-needed punch, but it was a struggle to eat), or by decorating their apartments and houses with plants or new furniture.
I close Instagram and roll over to reach for my laptop and awaken it from its nap.
It’s barely past 6pm—too early to text Kevin, I think.
I turn to stare out the window and its darker now, although the sun’s light still touches some part of the city, and having not turned on any lights yet, my now-on laptop illuminates my face, the only visible thing in my room (if you were to lie prone in my front yard and stare into my window from the outside).
I see that I got an email from work, and I assume it’s edits on a document because emails to me are so often about edits—which are at its core both a desire to make better and an acknowledgment that the original just wasn’t quite good enough,—with bright red strikethroughs or underlined additions, (sometimes with comments attached, as if the edits weren’t enough), and I know that they aren’t critiques of my character, but I avoid the email all the same.
I text Kevin, “Walk?”
While it may be too early for our walk—we usually start at around 11pm, avoiding the majority of nightly strollers for public health reasons—the repetitive cycle of our walks, the routine of them, has become a constant social interaction on which (as I’ve mentioned to Kevin repeatedly) I now rely, even when Kevin shouts “Six feet!” if I veer too close.
Because it’s much easier to disguise loneliness with company.
We spend a couple of hours every night just chatting about anything (but mostly about nothing), and while on its surface our chats seem shallow—tales from our respective homes or our problems at work or random thoughts—I sense that after months of this routine, the amalgamation of different iterations of me, formed by our nightly chats, paints an increasingly clearer picture for Kevin of his walking partner, a mosaic of past stories and current insecurities mixed with emotions (sometimes quite heated), as well Kevin’s reactions to them, constructing a gestaltian whole, one that is equal parts who I am and who I am hiding, one where too much information is dangerous because how else can you tap into your truest self than with day-to-day chats that together, in repetition, form your core identity?
(I flinch just thinking about what that level of closeness entails, fancying myself as more akin to an enigma than an overanalyzed AP Literature book.)
As a countermeasure to throw him off, I started to get mean, just a little bit, just enough to push him away slightly, because while I relied on our walks too much to cancel them, I didn’t like the idea of him seeing this newly revealed person—my truest self—but then the meanness grew uncontrollably until it couldn’t be stopped, and soon I was yelling and shouting at Kevin, and I would storm off, or once I threw both of my shoes at him in succession (missed both times, but he’d tell you it was the principle of it), and I’d send longwinded texts after our walks, just walls of blue about my feelings, misdirecting my frustrations with the world and my work and my basement (and really, if I’m being honest, frustrations about myself) at him, and he wouldn’t respond until the next day when I’d write “Walk?” and he’d say “OK.” because at this point it was a routine for both of us, and then one night he said that I was abusive and I should talk to someone who wasn’t him (“Like a therapist?” I asked for clarification) and then meanness stopped, as if pulled backwards, and I wondered if maybe this was my truest self, someone who was just angry and wild and, worst, stuck, like a man in quicksand lashing out at his surroundings but only in desperation.
In panic.
Because I haven’t moved and I am alone in a basement, slowly falling apart (both the basement and me), with no one to call, every night yelling at the one person who spends any time with me because what if, at my core, I am cruel—I mean, look at the mosquitos—and all I do is stare out of my barred windows, living literally in my own mess, left with my thoughts, left behind by my running, cooking, home-owning peers, constantly sent edits for my character, notes with which I can use to improve myself because the first draft just isn’t quite good enough.
And still Kevin and I walked, the one constant during these otherwise fluctuating times.
We may end our walks—it is, after all, fall, and fall is the season of change.
And sometimes change is a good thing.
But for now, it’s too early for a walk, so I get up from my bed only to sit back down on my exercise ball and stare at my laptop.
It may be hours until I move again.
Kevin responds.
“OK.”
- Quicksand During a Pandemic - March 5, 2023