It’s a collision of worlds. The micro and the macro.
It’s logging on to the WHO situation tracker at four in the morning to note the body count, to watch the blobs of infection grow on the ‘interactive’ world map. Curiosity and concern? Or painfotainment?
Back home, it’s the playgrounds wrapped in neon orange, plastic barricades. It could’ve been barbed wire. Maybe it should have been.
It’s being out for a stroll in my neighbourhood and watching people veer from the sidewalk onto the deserted street to avoid walking near me. No longer anonymous, I am now the bringer of fear, a different kind of host.
It’s news from America, proof that heartlessness can have an epicentre too. A heartland.
It’s knowing that somewhere, somehow, people are scheming to profit from this misery.
It’s the helicopter that buzzes my house. I know it’s not the traffic report. What’s it doing up there?
It’s public money that appears in my bank account, a plea to keep spending… perhaps in the gift shop of a cruise ship whose windows have sunk below the water line.
It’s the fine days where the arrogant birds sing from inside the sunlit branches of their trees. Their song is the same. It’s me who is different.
It’s work culture, abetting the shift to our avatars.
It’s the envy and the pity of watching a dog, serene and oblivious, sleeping in a wedge of sunshine.
It’s the photos sent by family and friends who, gripped by nostalgia, dive into their hard drives to share memories of happier times.
It’s knowing I'll one day look back and remember much of this fondly, back when we were all together, morning, noon and night, when I cut the kids' hair and helped them with their homework and built them a cubby house in the yard that became our world. Back when we always knew where the children were, and that they were safe as long as they were near.
– Yannick