My time spent at home since lockdown is numeric.
Spent being the operative word.
The family car - a big red thing - became a devoted donkey in bringing home all of my university belongings. 3 boxes of which now live in the garage, cold and alone and belonging to a time now deceased. What's the use of the thousand stories tied to the half-pint glass ‘borrowed’ from the pub down the road, the bottle-opener that birthed a colony of tonic bottle-tops and corks on my mantle?
I’m back living in a home that has its own set of details and cutlery and sentimental priorities. I spend hours sat in my childhood bedroom whose freshly painted walls were fresh in 2015. Now 9 shoeboxes fill the spaces by my feet. And that’s only a product of when I have the energy to window shop a near-future that isn’t as near as it used to be, as I'd like it to be.
Lockdown feels like wartime some days. I remember the first PM’s address on TV about social distancing, the r number and addressing the nation with quite tangible stubborn passion. Instead of covering windows to black-out escaping light, I sit at mine all day. Watching. I don’t care about the village traffic, the passing walkers or nameless faces.
When it's sunny I sometimes stand outside and close my eyes, tilt my head up at the sun and window-shop at passing fantasies. Fantasies where I’m stood on a beach far away, in a completely new place or back in Chicago.
But like my 9 pairs of new, unworn shoes I can only retrieve an obsolete fragment of that fresh life. Lockdown isn’t the be-all, end-all. The real monster is the wait. The waiting game of post-uni: the sticky, weary limbo of needing that call to the real life. A place you can pick up and take your boxes to.
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