A letter to every single person
Four months ago I wrote a letter. To myself. Last week I re-wrote it. It's from my past to my future, which is now also my past. But I invite every single person out there to read it.
Francesca Melandri from Italy wrote a letter to us a few months ago.“We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time” she writes, “we watch you as you behave just as we did”. She goes on to predict our future. Accurately. Though she speaks broadly and far, it feels intimate. You’ll flinch at every spat word lest it land on your face. Please read it — but not until after you’ve read this.
By being encouraged (read: begged) to think big about protecting everyone in the whole wide world by staying at home, wearing masks, giving everyone we pass a wide berth, we’ve ironically become even more introspective and borderline self-obsessed than ever before. Me included. You included.
I’ve spent months being utterly preoccupied with my own little world. I live on my own. My family is small and spilt into an hour in one direction and an hour in another. I do not have a car. I work(ed) in London, where every day is peopled and busy. I used to see at least one friend every day. But now I am alone and the sudden contrast is, at times, unbearable.
So I, too, have written a letter. To myself. From my past to my future, which is now also my past. But I invite every single person out there to read it.
To Kat,
They say you must stay at home. A simple request. What you are about to live through is not as simple. Before now, others had said you should write what you fear. Well, here goes.
First, you will think. You will think even more than usual. And stare into space a lot.
Then you will cry.
Then, you will drink. Sometimes you will drink on your own, and sometimes you will join one of the many virtual drinks gatherings you’ve been invited to by colleagues, family or friends. This is when you first meet Zoom. Zoom is your new flatmate. The fun date on these Zoom calls expires after one month. That’s how long it takes for humans to use technology to turn something innocent and well-meaning into something cynical. You will learn quickly that passive aggression translates really well on Zoom but that, conversely, sarcasm does not.
But Zoom is not just about the fun. It quickly becomes the only way your colleagues will communicate with you. All of you will forget how to use a phone. And since you will be spending ninety percent of your days staring at your own face on video (and frivolities like make up and hair brushing became a thing of the past weeks ago) you will, for the first time ever, find yourself wondering what percentage of your savings could realistically be siphoned off, and put towards some minor plastic surgery in the near future. For this reason, you will miss most of what your colleagues are saying to you, and have to email them immediately after to ask. You will realise you are fighting a one-woman battle to reinstate the email as King of communication at work. Resistance is futile. Zoom is here to stay.
You will make part of your flat a temporarily permanent office. But not before trying out every other available part of your flat first, in your own sad rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. “This breakfast bar is too big, this sofa is too squidgy, this bed is unprofessional and it feels a bit weird having my whole team in bed with me on Zoom calls”. You’ll revisit your first option, the breakfast bar, deciding now that it’s “juuust riiiight”. It’s big but it’s hard and comes without a side dish of accidental subtext, unlike this sentence.
(You’ll notice I’ve said ‘Zoom’ quite a bit. It is now an everyday word).
You will no longer just ‘go’ outside. You will ‘venture’. But you will freeze when another person walks towards you, and you will look away from the people you pass. You’ll even avoid your own shadow on one particularly unstable outing. Every excursion brings anxiety and awkwardness. After each, you will return to an empty flat, and have no one to talk to about it. You’ll probably write it down somewhere instead. In a letter, perhaps.
You will be scared to go to the supermarket at first, but soon it will become your favourite part of the week. Soon after that, it will become your favourite part of the day. The supermarket is now a magical place; you will consequently double your weekly grocery spend but magically never have any food in the house. It doesn’t really matter, because you will be saving so much money from not buying ad-hoc London coffees or not going on ad-hoc French holidays or not doing anything ad-hoc anywhere at all.
Your phone is now part of you. It’s where Instagram is. You will not stop comparing your body to the bodies on Instagram fitness accounts for the whole of lockdown. So you will over-exercise. You will use your one outing of the day to run, and your body will start to hurt. You eventually give in and buy an exercise bike and a set of weights. This will be difficult because a) you know nothing about either of these things or how to go about choosing them and b) everyone else had the exact same idea, only earlier than you did, so everything good was sold out and you had to go with what was left. You will suspect you overpaid.
To top things off, all of this will lead to the relinquishing of another corner of your flat; this time to a gym. It’s unsightly and completely clashes with the aesthetic of your living room which, up until now, was a pleasing collaboration of eccentric furniture you never sat on, IKEA lighting and meticulously placed cushions. Begrudgingly, you will admit that this is better than the alternative — which is to give up altogether. You will cancel your real-life gym membership. Congratulations. You now live in your gym and your office. You will briefly consider converting the downstairs floor, where you don’t live, into a swimming pool. Why not go the whole hog. This thought begins with you wondering exactly how old your downstairs neighbours are. They must be getting on now…
You will clean. The cleaning is constant. But nothing will ever feel clean. And you will do so much laundry. You will enjoy the feeling of the warm bed sheets, that you’ve just taken out of the tumble dryer, against your body. You will liken it to the warmth of a hug. It will remind you of a hug from the past. You will let yourself remember that you once had access to the the safety of another person’s arms and you’ll wonder why you let that go then, when it could have meant company now. In that moment, all you will want is that hug. Then you will cry again.
But not long after, you will start to be thankful that you’re not stuck inside all the time with someone who wasn’t good company when he was only there half the time. You’ll congratulate yourself once again on dodging that bullet. Friends will relate stories of their overbearingly annoying partner’s traits, now exacerbated by the cabin fever which has fully set in. You will offer sympathy but secretly find these mildly amusing and wildly comforting.
You will receive at least one text message from at least one ex boyfriend. Delete it.
You will sleep. You will sleep a lot. But you will have vivid bad dreams. Then you will wake up, by yourself, feeling more alone than ever. On some weekends, you might not get out of bed. You will withdraw, but nobody will notice because, uniquely, everybody else has withdrawn too.
Yes, you will be lonely. And you won’t tell anyone, because you don’t want to worry them. You might try telling them, but you’ll turn it into a joke so they don’t realise. You will ignore phone calls that come when you are in the thick of a dark day. Then you’ll lie and say you were out running, or in the bath. Then you’ll feel bad for lying. You will stop making plans, because you can’t see past tomorrow. This is the roughest part, but it does soften. I promise.
Then, at what may or may not turn out to have been halfway through lockdown, you will be allowed to visit another household. Or meet up with one person from one household. Or stare at one person through one set of French windows. To be honest, you won’t really understand what it is you’re allowed to do from this point on. What I’m saying is that if it was against the rules to stay at your parents’ house for a few weeks at this point then well, you will break some rules. And you will realise that actually, you quite liked being alone. You will give your parents a big hug and discover that you weren’t much of a hugger after all.
Parts will be liberating. You can dance in your living room at midnight on a Sunday and dance in your kitchen in the morning (or whenever you choose to get up) on a Monday and sing at the top of your lungs in the shower anytime you want. So you do. Your neighbours will begin to miss the days you were out from six am to ten pm, five days a week, and quiet with hangovers for whole weekends. Don’t worry about them though. They’re merely sitting ducks now; you’ve been Googling indoor pool heaters all month…
You will eventually find a balance between normality and reality. In the beginning this means you will keep setting your alarm as though you have an early train to catch, but you will stop wearing a bra. Incidentally, this serves as an allegory for the fight between control and freedom as you simultaneously clutch to parts of order and liberate other parts. Then at some point, you will stop setting your alarm too and be forced to embrace what has, by now, been termed the ‘new normal’.
This will most likely collide with the day you get furloughed and you lose all concept of time and purpose altogether. (What even is a bra? Is it French?) It’s a weird day and you won’t know how to feel. No one else at your company will be able to tell you how you should feel either because they don’t know, they don’t even know how to feel about it themselves. No one in the entire world does. For once, ignorance is not bliss. You will vow to continue to join team meetings voluntarily because you worry you’ll get left behind. You will join one meeting for the whole of furlough – late.
Listen to me. Enjoy furlough. Life is short, but furlough is shorter. It’s genuinely all fun and games. No catch. Seriously — there is no catch. If you only ever listen to one bit of advice from me, make it this: enjoy furlough. Read, sleep, take long baths, swim in the sea, get an enviable tan, cook. Relax. This is your new normal, and it’s good. The only thing that ruins it is knowing that a newer normal is coming. And it is coming — you will be sent back to work. And it will feel rude.
You are about to ride a roller coaster of feelings. You will feel selfish but compassionate, worried but hopeful, vulnerable but surviving, indignant but grateful, carefree but caged. This has given you a new lease of life, but made you a prisoner in your own home. You will lose and regain this perspective every day. Some of the feelings you’ll feel will surprise you, because you thought they were long gone. Don’t despair. This doesn’t mean you never escaped them. Remember that it took a life-altering pandemic to bring them back to the front of the room.
All of this, like the virus, will pass.
Yours,
Kat