Living Alone During Quarantine
Emily Peotto
I had just booked a flight to London when I heard about COVID-19. The plan was to fly into London, then Rome, Portugal, Ireland, and then back to Toronto. I was nervous about asking for two weeks off from a job I hadn’t even started yet. I haven’t taken a substantial amount of time off since the beginning of my second year at university. I have a paralyzing fear of inertia, stuck in the mindset that time off equals laziness and that laziness equals incompetence.
While I’m still a Residence Advisor and the Editor-in-Chief of a campus publication, my jobs have changed drastically. I can’t see my students, who now, more than ever, need help to guide a tumultuous end to their first years. I can’t print or distribute my magazine, which holds stories so beautiful they make my heart hurt. I feel a responsibility to do more, to be more — but instead, I sit alone in my one-bedroom apartment, where the brick walls constrict around me like a fist curling inward.
I feel very lonely, as I’m sure most people do. I spend my days walking circles around my living room. Watching dishes pile up. Slicing eggplant, letting salt pull out the bitterness. I pull myself into downward dog, drag my body through six sets of burpees, lay my head to rest on a yoga mat that I have yet to clean in five years of ownership.
Before dinner, I walk circles around Kerr Hall Quad, a small mountain of grass that has turned into an unofficial dog park, since all the real dog parks have closed, and grass is hard to come by in downtown Toronto. I feel guilty for being outside, for taking pleasure in the company of strangers, something that many frontline workers are overwhelmingly terrified of right now. But I fear I will go crazy inside, so I walk anyway.
I have fallen into what people are calling “the new normal,” a phrase I have otherwise purposefully neglected to use. A routine of waking up, eating, watching TV, eating, and falling back asleep. I have stopped washing my face. Some mornings, I eat leftover fried eggplant for breakfast.
I text an old friend to tell her that I miss feeling alive. She tells me to take cold showers, “just tie your hair up and stand in the cold water for 30 seconds.” I wonder if a shower will make me feel how meeting my boyfriend felt, how pulling my drunk friends into an Uber feels, how teaching someone how to breathe again in the middle of a panic attack feels.
30 seconds turns into a minute. A minute into two. I let the water soak through my hair, run over me. My body is shocked to feel something other than the stale air of my apartment, the weight of my comforter. My phone vibrates for an email from WestJet: “Hello Emily R Peotto,” it reads. “Due to adjustments to our flight schedule, we’re sorry to advise you that it has been necessary to change one or more of your flights and we are unable to provide an alternative flight option.” Two minutes turn into five.
I let myself take time. Think about the whole world slowing down with me, taking one, collective, deep breath. Maybe that’s what this is all, actually, about. Making eggplant parmesan. Tracing circles around Kerr Hall Quad. Calling my parents back. Protecting the people I love in the only way I can. Pausing.
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