The lockdown ostensibly ended a few weeks ago, although it was hard to really sense what had changed since the children were still not really going to school and I couldn't get back to work. Everything was the same — I woke up before 5:30 to the sun coming through the window and went downstairs to weigh myself and meditate and write some different things in my bullet journal: my weight, and the number of words I had written and how much I had eaten the day before. I turned over the compost in the garden, breaking up clumps and mixing in the grass clippings. I got a haircut on the first day I could, even though that seemed extravagant and unnecessary, a thing that had been the focus of the lockdown and what everyone seemed more concerned about than anything. Was what you were doing needed.
At the beginning of all of this, I watched the numbers closely, who had gotten ill and how the deaths were trending, until it finally became normal and a thousand people dying a day was okay. The perception of things kept changing, what you thought was bad and unacceptable then became acceptable. In the US, you can see it in the way that numbers of dead and infected have been discussed. A few weeks ago they said the numbers might get as high as a hundred thousand a day and that sounded impossible, but then every day they have been creeping up and it seems like a smaller number than it was. How long before you can accept anything in life, any hardship that is placed in front of you.
For me, it's still just a number. I've only known people in my periphery who have gotten ill and I said to Yoko that I wanted to see it, that I wanted to know what it was actually like. I don't, I'm sure, given the actual chance, I would immediately regret saying what I said. If there were a hundred thousand people injured in car accidents, how different would that look. There could be people at the scene taking pictures. We could look at it and know what it is exactly. Instead, now, it's just a cough and a fever that one day turns and you have no oxygen in your blood anymore and then you die or you don't, depending on a number of factors that we don't really understand yet. We, the newsreaders, the people who follow different news outlets and blogs and then report back to our Boomer parents who doubt everything they read now. Say things authoritatively because we read them somewhere.
Last Wednesday, I walked up to the supermarket, to Waitrose, to buy some things and in the course of the walk, I decided it was time to shave off my beard. I don't know why exactly, why that moment was the moment that was chosen for me, but walking home, the sensation felt like something I needed to hold on to or it would pass and I would lose the courage. I opened the front door, left the bag in the kitchen, locked myself in the toilet, and shaved it all off. More than a year of growth, a whole personality, gone like that. I looked at myself and my chin was shorter, my face shrunken down from the pandemic hair around me. Ten years younger, or more. Just like that.
With no restrictions, I can run on the canal and not worry so much about how it's perceived. The marathon was cancelled again, but it doesn't matter anymore. I get up and meditate and eat and write my numbers in my book and then run. My heart rate monitor broke, but it didn't matter suddenly. All it had taught me was that I could probably slow down when I was tired. And that slowing down when you were tired, without any good explanation, made you run faster in the end. My knee hurt and I rested. I got to the end of my miles and instead of pushing another half mile, I stopped, turned off my watch and walked the rest of the way. What does the number matter in the end, it's just me and I don't have to care, do I. The rain started to fall a bit and it didn't matter.