quarantine diary -- episode 2: being

last week, i made a run for essential items.

aka liquor.

i could have had it delivered but i made the excuse that i needed to start my car. y’know, for the good of the engine. in reality, i just needed to get out of the house — even if it was just for a few minutes. walking the same loop and staring at the same overgrown lawns and weeds sprouting from the sidewalk wasn’t doing it for me.

driving out of my parking garage and down the street, i had the strangest combination of relief and anxiety. the relief of being out. of not being confined to the same room. the same apartment. the same building. the anxiety of being out in an infected and infectious world. of having cautious behavior bleed into paranoid fears. it was the sensation of being simultaneously full and hungry. i tried to sit with it. it never settled. i tried to drive, hoping the breeze through the open window would blow it away like so much foul air. it sorta worked.

i talked to my therapist this week. it had been awhile. i held off previously, preferring to meet with her in person. feeling like i could handle things in the short term. it worked for about a month. i’m actually proud of that. i knew it wasn’t going to last forever. call it an emotional oil change.

if there’s been a common theme from the first few weeks of our new lives, it’s been the emphasis on keeping busy. what to watch. what to do. picking up new hobbies. rekindling old ones. but what happens when you’ve run out of shows you care to binge-watch? what happens when the streaming service al-gore-rhythm just isn’t hitting the sweet spot? we spend so much time doing and not nearly enough time being.

the average day is spent trying to be productive. i’ve always tried to accomplish one thing each day — even if that thing was as simple as taking a shower and putting on a new change of clothes. being on lockdown has shown me the folly of setting productivity as a measure of success. it’s led me to wonder if productivity isn’t just an avoidance technique for sitting with myself.

trying to take the boychild for walks at least once a day. out loud, i say it’s because it’s good for him to get sunshine and fresh air. quietly, it’s also because it’s good for me to get sunshine and fresh air. i take him to a nearby patch of grass. he pulls some of it up and throws it in the air. some of it lands in his hair. he’s both my escape and my inspiration. a reminder of what we all once were and what we’d all like to be again. a totem of the joy found in being versus doing.

be like the boychild. he may be my salvation.