Every morning I roll out of bed and stumble the 1.5 strides to the bathroom. I look in the mirror and study the damage; one new spot since yesterday, five new eyebrow hairs, a shade darker under the eyes. I toy with the idea of doing something to remedy this, but then sigh and do little more than splash water from the sink lined in dirt and limescale. If it’s a ‘treat day’ I might apply a thin layer of face cream but today, like most others, is nondescript so tepid water will suffice. Pasty skin ready, I grab one of my face coverings from the coat hanger, rubber gloves from the box and go out into the big, dangerous world to stand in a queue. “Just another day in paradise” plays solemnly through my headphones, a Phil Collins track which I long to change, but my unisex latex gloves are two sizes too big and even if I could, touching the screen would only defeat the point of preventing the spread of germs. I leave him be.
Here I am, starting another 24 hours in a string of days that end in the letter Y. Dull, predictable and dragging, welcome to the human face of lockdown.
If you haven’t already got the gist from recent posts, in March (2020) I made the choice to move fully back in with my family, days before the UK went into COVID-19 lockdown.
I own a house, a car and a job in the same location, but with the job reduced to working from home and my ability to travel limited to as far as the curb-side wheelie bin, it seemed more logical to return northwards.
At 27, the novelty of spending an extended period of time with my family felt like a throwback to the days when home was a refuge from exhausting summer jobs or algebra homework. But now the family home represents my safety and my imprisonment. I am denied my freedom and, some days, forgetting what it feels like to be a fully accountable adult at all. I’m turning into a woman-child.
Three weeks I thought this would last, three. But now we’re speedily heading towards twelve and to be quite honest, I fully expect it to last longer than that. I normally work out of an office populated by a large number of employees. I can only imagine what social distancing will look like if I am, ever, mandated to five days a week in that environment.
Can you imagine the first day of everyone being back? A three hour queue to get your pass reactivated, followed by at least two trying to fix some technical fault with laptops (always tends to be that way). Everyone will take an extended lunchbreak (by which point the only option will be a cheese sandwich) and then there’s just enough time to go around hugging as many people as possible before it’s home time. Michelle is given an out of date bottle of wine from the store cupboard for something she won twelve months ago and then it’s off to the car park for gridlock congestion.
That reminds me, I think I left behind a large stash of snack bars in my locker before I left town. Damn.
I’ve gotten slightly off topic, but then again, I always do. Can you really blame me, when one of the few excuses I get to spend time away from my family is to find one of the few quiet spots in the house and type on this blog? Mumma B is forever demanding new blog post, Papa B is forever blissfully unaware of them (but then sending a text to dad has a likelihood of receival on a same level of attaching a letter to a dove in a hurricane).
I haven’t dyed my hair since January. I guess originally I saw it as a form of resistance, the idea that I wouldn’t colour it until we were out of lockdown, but that idea faded as quickly as the shade of my roots. Resistance turned to indifference, colour fading with every wash, and now I’m reunited with a shade of brunette I haven’t seen in years. It could almost pass for stylish, a layered multi-tonal style.
Makeup? What are these expensive alien products of which you speak? I’ve almost forgotten how to apply what little I used to wear. Mascara is a challenge, the smudgy black fluid streaking up my eyelid and smearing across my fingers when I try and rub it off. I’m a toddler experimenting with these curious substances, playing about with pencils and powders that used to mean something to me. The woman I recognise in those summer holiday pictures, how can I look like her? How can I wear lipstick like she once did without turning into a clown? But then, what’s the point?
Now you can’t exit the house without having to cover up. Facial coverings and gloves have swept across the globe, marking the creation of a new religion with its own dress code. The irony, the racists and xenophobics who used to speak against religious coverings are now the same people yelling that face and hand covering should be made a legal requirement. Next they’ll be demanding the use of headscarves to prevent spread, whilst splashing and gargling in the sea. Society has been united (be it on a surface level) by new codes of conducts and coverings. We have no way to object to the world around us, voices blocked by sheets of fabric, we can only go along with the rule of government. By law or by fear, the faith of the fatigued marches on in varying gaps of social distance.
The highlight of my week is now the Saturday morning food shop and the lowlight is getting back from it. That feeling of exhaustion from exerting myself more than at any other point in the days leading up to it. The rub of the fabric mask, the feel of rubber residue that sticks to my fingers long after I’ve taken the gloves off. In the world I live in this is one of the few excuses I have to leave the house, my world is now so tightly tethered to that of my family. I have no friends to see, no places to visit, no errands to run that can’t be handled over the phone.
Fun is now reduced to comparing the length of supermarket queues week-on-week and counting the number of times we’re reminded to keep two meters apart over the tannoy. The buzz when tinned foods are taken off restrictions, the disappointment when when they’re reapplied the following week. Three tins of soup per customer, a luxury. And yet, the Saturday food shop is the one thing that reminds me time is passing at all. Time is reduced to the little-wins, twice daily teeth brushing, hair washes every other day, changing bedding every few weeks. The mundane activities that make milestones of hope; another week towards a vaccine, another week towards normality. And not just a new one, a true one.
The phrase ‘new normal’ has grated on me since first time it was used by politicians who know about as much on what ‘normal’ looks as Chairman Mao knew of peasant struggles during the 1960s famine. New normal implies that this is the first time normal has changed, but what about the invention of the internet? Or the Industrial Revolution? Or when we started hunting with metal spears instead of stone? In which case, what are we headed into? New Normal Version 9999998767.8?
Instead of new normal, I’ve adopted a different phrase, ‘My Normal’. The way I see it, you have to embrace and adapt to what works best and safe for you. In lieu of coffee shops I’ve taken pleasure in making my own coffee and enjoying the views I’m lucky to have. I miss the noise and hubbub of activity, but sometimes I think it’s easy to romanticise an experience. Countless times in life I’d find myself trawling from coffee shop to coffee shop to find space, only to find it too noisy to focus or hold a conversation.
I write a hell of a lot more now than I used to. Whether the quantity results in quality is yet to be seen but regardless it feels, well, good. But I’ve also dropped the stupid targets, I’ve moved away from expecting myself to have produced the next best-seller. I’ve realised that I get bored, I procrastinate, I live with three other adults who seek me out if I go three hours without doing a tea run. I’m human. One day I’ll spend an evening working solidly on a manuscript, another I’ll decide to do something unrelated to writing; I might watch rubbish TV or read my History Magazine. My lunchbreaks I might donate towards researching the publishing industry or even find myself so done with taking myself seriously that I turn to this blog to remember that deep down I am still the kooky person I’ve always have been. No lockdown is going to stop me being me.
Do I scrap with my family? Of course! Even when I was living here as a teenager and my parents were working jobs we didn’t see each other as much as we do now. There have been plenty of times I wanted to get away from it all and return to life where I had my independence and my freedom. But the benefits of being in a space where I feel safe and wanted outweigh having to ‘go it alone’. I am incredibly lucky to have the family I do, even if they do all drive me insane.
And here’s something potentially controversial; I’m actually more content now than I have been in years.
Gone is the pressure to look a certain way or to live in a certain location (e.g. London). I don’t feel the pressure to be in a relationship, in fact, as time has gone on and the faked perfection has slowly disappeared from the internet, I’m left wondering what it must be like those couples, the unstable relationships built on sand and Snapchat filters.
In just under three months my life has, once again, changed enormously. And there was I thinking living in London was the biggest shake-up to happen to me. Moving back into the family abode is shifting my perceptions and five-year goals more than any office manager or two-day Excel training course ever did.
Those lamenting that office work is as extinct as the dinosaurs need to get real and understand that people will always crave social interactions. There will always be a queue for my office car park and when the doors open I will be at the front of it.
Like everyone else I worry for the future economy, my job security and the health of those I care most about. But of all that I worry most about what we will become. More than once I have woken from a nightmare, to discover it was only a more warped version of the life I used to lead before. I fear that when this is all over and the generation moves on behind us, we will horrify or romanticise this event like it’s our version of Vietnam. The youth will never understand, will never appreciate what we went through, when in fact we were the ones who returned to 45-hour weeks, we were the ones who were so desperate to recoup physical loses that we forgot the gains we made on our front door.
But more than this, so much more, is the reassurance that this will not last forever. One day I will return to the town where I live and work. My mum will go back to cooking for two, not four, my sister will teach in schools and my dad will be able to work in customer’s homes without wearing a mask. None of us will be the same, but we will have future hope. One day we will all be reunited and will laugh; back when we thought this would all be over in less than three weeks.
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My Housemate's a Mermaid 