2020 - 2021
Melbourne, Australia
Observations during the longest lockdown in the world.
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I go outside and breathe in deep. Feel my chest expand outwards and chant to my young son, “in through the nose and out through the mouth”. We run between the trees. There seem to be more birds than usual. The grass seems higher, wilder. A miasma of worry cloaks these walks and I wonder if it is just a matter of time before I lose someone I love. As Shübi sleeps in his room tonight, I will imagine his little, robust lungs, pink, clear and healthy. I think of my father walking through another park in another part of town. I miss squeezing him tight. I wonder if my friends are ok, circling their homes, hunkered down in front of the news, working out recipes that involve a couple of rationed cans of beans.
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Marriage in quarantine. Fridge full of homemade food for the first time in my adult life. Pasta for days. I cut our hair, our nails. You plant more herbs. I work, you play hide-and-seek. You work, I read Miffy and Dr Seuss. I cry, you worry. We both stay up too late. Captive mates, taking solace in each other’s warmth as the nights grow long and cold and by the same turn, treading on nerves rubbed raw. The gulf yawns open between us and we wave to each other from the precipice.
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Birthdays pass without fanfare. The gardens smell fecund.
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Articles keep appearing in my inbox about COVID-19 patients dying alone. The horror of it steals my breath away - that my parents, my child or my husband could be lying in a hospital bed, suffocating to death with no one around to lend a hand to hold. Drowning. These thoughts are dark and punctuate, like a hammer and nail, the endless memes and political satires in the digital onslaught of the corona genre. In a time of incalculable tragedy, where is the line of reason?
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I sit a distance from my parents as we surreptitiously meet at the park for some “exercise”. It is only my son that is really exerting much energy, hiding behind trees, counting down from ten as he peers through his splayed fingers. We sit several meters away from each other, not talking much, pretending to be strangers and taking comfort in the sight of each other.
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I’ve never been so mindful about my breath before. We’ve been looking at masks, reading about makeshift materials - what works and what doesn’t work. Someone stood at the entrance of the elevator and coughed on us the other day, without covering his mouth as the doors opened. No where to turn and nothing to do but stare in disbelief and step around him out to the foyer, mind spinning with the image of uncountable microscopic particles entering our bodies and the sound of rolling dice. So now we wear masks whenever we have to leave our apartment. Inhaling the hot air of our own breaths, rapid-fire heartbeats as I carry my son so that he doesn’t press buttons whilst hefting groceries at the same time. We walk in the door and I drop everything to scrub our hands, gulping down big lungfuls of unfiltered air.
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My only saving grace right now is the drive of motherhood - the unrelenting nature of wake, dress, feed, nap, play, feed, bathe, sleep. We started building cubby houses yesterday. Small, make-believe spaces, where I knock to be invited in and am offered a cup of coffee and some butter on toast. Old spaces are made new again and we move between them, rowing boats across the rug, sometimes falling and having to swim to safety. Our imaginary places feel profoundly nostalgic. Oh look, here’s the playground. Let’s go down the slide. Meet you at the bottom.
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I’ve been having dreams of late, powerful enough to haunt me during the day. Scenes of accidents hijacking my mid-morning walks. Road crossings fraught as I imagine trucks coming out of nowhere, pond edges rising to cliff bluffs. I am reminded of that foggy time postpartum, cortisol dialed up, anxiety in ectasis. Dawn breaks and with the light comes the fear of another day where nothing is safe.
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Heart like a white-knuckled fist.
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Afternoon sun and oblique shadows across a collapsed city of wooden blocks. Tennis balls and spatulas cast with equal abandon - a democracy of disarray. Endless cycles of washes, alternating from the kitchen to the laundry. I am peaceful one minute and angry the next with shades of everything else in-between. All our theatre played out against the same backdrop, the same mottled canvas of domesticity.
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Has there ever been anything sweeter than the life of a child pushed up against the knife edge of mortality? I hear his voice now and it sounds like bells. The velvet skin of his cheek, a perfect peach. Today, I cried because I missed my father. My son came to me and laid his head on my chest. At dinner, he asked me if I was better. I shared an apple with him. Time compresses, stretches out, atomized with the endless sameness of our daily routine. Our centre of orbit - home, the park across the road, home again.
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Michael was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week. Mortality hovers like a fickle muse. The days take longer to pass and the two weeks in quarantine have stretched out in our minds to encompass a fluid-like period with no definitive end in sight, a constant staccato of anxiety thrumming in the background.
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Five months and counting. He walks deserted streets. Rising concrete and glass monoliths. A landscape abbreviated. He sees no one, speaks to no one, touches nothing. He knows only what I tell him - it is winter, a coat is necessary, the outside is dangerously unclean. We play hide and seek in the rain, the slick roads mirroring a metropolis built for people and inhabited by none. In October, he will be three. It will be one-sixth of his life where people cross the road when they see you and step out of elevators in fear. Half-faced.