I can't breathe!
My eyes snapped open in the darkness, fixing on where the ceiling was then tracking across it
to the digital wall clock resting above the headboard. The time shone in a dull green glow :
03:15. Another day. Another day in this lockdown. In this imposed shelter-in-place.
I had fallen asleep while contemplating the cracks spider webbing across my ceiling. Feet
pointed towards the headboard, arms splayed like the crucified man, my knuckles brushing the
cold tiles. It has been eleven days since the lockdown and I was afraid I was going mad.
Every day was the same routine. Each task melding into the other to create a rather simplistic
web of tedious monotony. I was beginning to forget what it was like to breathe. At least
outside my brown door there was variety for my senses to feast upon. I might eat different
food from morning to sundown and another on a different day, but I'd end up circling back to
the first. I never knew movie watching could become so quickly boring after the first three
days of watching from sundown to sunup. Back then I used to think of it as a privilege. But
now I could only watch a vapid hyper masculine man turn a torpedo so many times. Nothing
was new, everything was recycled. Like my days. I swear the sun looked the same, moved across
the sky in the same way with the same intensity, and the colours brushed across the sky when it
set was the same. When it rained, it was with the same ear-wormy noise that repeated itself over
and over again in my head long after it had stopped.
The days stretched on long and the nights even longer.
On the third day they came for my neighbour and bundled him away into an ambulance. I
didn't expect to see him for another fourteen days. Pity. After he was taken there was no one to
talk to. We wouldn't see who was the ruler of draught for a while. The crazy Christian lady
that lived above me always came knocking every morning without fail but I always ignored
her. I could only say "no I do not want my soul saved" so many times.
She played her TV very loudly though. So loud I tried to drown it out with Ozzy Osbourne
but it managed to worm its way through until I was breathless with frustration.
Thankfully the last neighbour kept to themselves, and they were so silent they might as well
not be alive. Sometimes I pressed my ear against the walls to hear something, anything. The
crazy lady also tried her best to know them. She went there in the evening unfailing. I hear her
come downstairs and plod through the passage to their door. But no one ever answered.
On the eighth day I opened my door to remind myself what my corridor looked like and she
was there. She had an ear-to-ear grin that made me deeply wary. Then she told me there was
nothing to fear from touching her if that was what I was worried about.
"There is nothing like Coronavirus. It's all 5G, Pastor Chris said so and there is this VN you
should listen to."
It was then I realized I was right not to rate her. She was an empty headed lemming. But later
that night I realized however daft she was, she had people to care about and people that
returned that emotion. I could hear her loud cackling laughs and guffaws whenever they
called. Sometimes I found myself leaning to hear more, to be a part of something that wasn't
the humdrum I was trapped in.
On days I counted things. I counted calories, I counted cups in a bag of rice, I counted the
weight I'd lost, the weight I'd gained. I tracked the movements of the tiny ginger ants along the
wall. I broke their chain to watch their reaction. At nights I scrolled through my contacts,
YouTube, Twitter. They all felt mind numbing. Just the same recycled nonsense.
Even my dreams were the same. A monochromatic, dull palette, flat landscape where nothing
happened. When I woke from my dreams, there was always a tightness in my chest from
holding my breath. The only relief I ever got was realising it until I wished I never woke.
