So that grace might increase

The lockdown goes on — I am counting the days in the bullet journal I started at the beginning of February and every day passes and it's now somewhere in the eighties I guess. Now though, it all feels normal and the little graces, like the opening of Cafe Nero today, feels like a small gift. There are placards up about how often everyone is washing their hands and how we can all feel safe. The economy has shrunk so much the numbers almost seem meaningless — what does any of that mean to anyone until you don't have a job or can't eat or can't get the things you need. I have a new computer that I got because I can't travel and the money in the budget needs to be spent. It's unequal like everything else. Someone, somewhere out there is dying, but the Pihlajas of Harborne, with all our other problems, have been untouched so far. 

I gained weight for the first two weeks of the lockdown, as I finished my solo marathon and stopped running and was just eating and eating further into a stress spiral. Then like that, I took a different tack and decided to instead drop weight, to make that my obsession and have been filling the bullet journal with charts and notes, to take all the mystery out of it, to analyse it so closely and carefully that when I am losing weight in the future — because I will be losing weight in the future — I will have a plan, it will be clearly laid out for me so that I don't waste my time wondering about how much I need to eat. I have been going for long walks. I've been drinking protein shakes. I've stopped being hungry. The Galaxy watch tells me how many kilocalories I've used and praising me in a way that I find more comforting than the other apps and devices I've used in the past. It understands me. It tells me it's not good to have too many restrictions. It says some weight loss plans are harder than others.

I've been trying to write about my dreams in my journal as well — I'd heard this was something that Bobby Byrd does, writes poetry in the morning based on his dreams. Mei has gone back to school, two days a week, and last night I dreamt she was young again, two or three and her body was covered in growths. I didn't know the name of the disease when I saw it in my dream, and googled all day trying to find it, find its description and a photo of it and finally did: Neurofibromatosis. Of course, Mei is fine, and the dream was just my own insecurities playing out from this active memory of when I was paralysed at the end of the PhD and we were moving and Mei had the most awful eczema and Yoko was washing her in the shower and Mei was crying and Yoko was saying in Japanese, We will not lose to this, again and again. I don't remember having any agency, I remember just listening and feeling a pit in my stomach — I was gaining weight then too, wasn't I. 

The other things, all the work, the books, the three books I'm writing or have written or have edited, the funding bid, the student meetings, have been filling the bullet journal as well and I have been dutifully ticking things off as they come up. At the end of the year, there is an imperceptible moment where the tide has turned and the requests and meetings start to thin out more and more until there are almost none and you have to begin thinking about next year and whatever it will be that you have to do next. What will the Pihlajas of Harborne do when there is some freedom. Now, with none, we do what we can, we go for long walks up towards Hagley Road, and stop to buy iced coffee, which we can buy, a small grace. I fall asleep on the sofa, watching TikTok videos, and shopping for things I don't need online. Before money stops having meaning, I should get a thing. Jeans or a new computer monitor. It is all ending, it's just a matter of how long we can hang on.