2021 Lockdown – Day 14

This will be a collection of random thoughts spontaneously digitised. I’m in bed, my brain feels like spaghetti and I’m not very sure about anything. I don’t suppose it’s much different for many people out there, either concerned about their job, their health, their kids or whatever else is on their minds.

I feel like I’ve arrived somewhere I never anticipated visiting and I’m not really sure which are the doors and which, the windows. This uninteresting box with no lid and the walls, painted in a thin wash, is not the least bit claustrophobic but neither does it feel spacious.

The room is within a larger room that seems to represent outdoors and yet is still contained. It’s more like a television or film set than anything else yet with no equipment in it. Neither the inner or outer rooms have any answers, only questions. They are blank canvases waiting to be decorated but there is no paint.

The winter seems to condense everything, with short days that compress time and dark nights that compress space. The lockdown doesn’t help with its limiting yet arbitrary restrictions. Feeling neither properly locked down nor free to go about normal life, we are suspended but only half an inch above ground.

We don’t wish for what we had because we know that’s a past we should leave behind. Neither do we know what we want because we have been conditioned not to hope recklessly. We suspect life could be much better but it would be cruel to have it within our grasp only to be scolded for touching it.

We can manage without normal but we still need to feel safe. Our fingers feel like the ends have been switched off. Our minds are tired of being reassigned to hugging duty and sometimes I really don’t care whether I’m on my head or my arse.

Could the government not have declared this January to be 2020.1? At least that would have made some sense as to why this feels like Groundhog Day. We’d happily lose 2021 like it was a massive hangover we slept through. Tacking points onto the old year would feel less like PTSD and no more weird than it is.

Grainy days and non-days always get me down (as the song, kind of, goes). But this year doesn’t have a sing song feel about it. It’s like a perpetual chorus that doesn’t know the next verse and can’t be sure there is one. I’ve not heard anyone talk about their sour dough plant for ages, not that I care to.

I know what I need to do if only I can be bothered to do it. I need to imagine a pot plant and place it in the corner of my yoghurt coloured virtual room. Then I need to put up some mystical curtains and magic a deep pile rug. Pluck a reading lamp from my rancid mind and read the book I keep promising myself to start.

We are all sojourners in this world, tenants of this fragile earth, travellers through the lives of others. Change is a fact of life and everything has its time. If we have to build castles, only for the tide to wash them away, so be it. I’ll decorate my 2020.1 as best I can, knowing it will be washed away. Then I’ll improve on it as I paint my 2020.2.

This too will pass. God I hope so.