Quarantine is like this: Sometimes I cook Instagram-angled meals, chopping parsley and grating lemon zest and positioning bowls just so, and other times I order boxes of pizza and gorge until my body feels like a separate thing from me, a bloated attachment I’m dragging from room to room. Sometimes I run, taking slow and measured strides down the country roads by my dad’s house; sometimes I go for gentle hikes with Eliza on what feel like unfairly beautiful trails, taking care to keep the approximate height of a tall man between us; sometimes I lie dully in bed or on the couch until my limbs are hot and sticky with sweat, the only light in the room the blue glow of my laptop screen. Sometimes I work hard, filing copy and brainstorming ideas and putting on makeup for Zoom pitch meetings; sometimes I numb out in front of “New Girl” or “Happy Endings” or any other show about groups of friends hanging out, filling hours together. I hate them, but the noise of their chatter helps me sleep.
Sometimes I partake in Zoom karaoke or PowerPoint parties or weekly brunches with my friends, checking in with them even more than I did before all this, and I feel part of something real, a community that loves and misses me; sometimes I am lonely in a way I haven’t been since eighth grade, when the only thing worse than my perpetual solitude was my awareness of how bad it must look to the people who cared about me. Sometimes I take a bath and read Jordan Kisner’s book of essays, or listen to the Gipsy Kings at full blast while making hummus, and I am glad to be alone; sometimes I see a deer out the window or try unsuccessfully to kill a fly with my clog and miss my parents “like a little kid,” as Phoebe Bridgers has it. Most of the time, I feel unimaginably lucky to be healthy, to be employed, to have a house to shelter in and a loaned car to drive and to have gotten safely out of the city before travel restrictions were in place; other times, I feel like I made a mistake, like I should have gone to my aunt’s in Gloucester or coaxed a friend up to Hudson with me or figured out some way, any way, not to be alone.
I am alone, almost all the time, but my awareness of that fact varies; sometimes it is the benign truth, and sometimes it is the principal condition of an unhappiness that feels like it would have found me eventually, quarantine or no; it’s a half-finished novel I left on a chair, knowing I’d eventually pick it back up. I leave more lights on than I should, and I startle awake at night noises. I read the Times website when I shouldn’t, when I’ve already gotten all the news I need for the day to do my job; I devour the op-eds and watch the videos of hospitals groaning with need, my stomach turning, but it’s not real to me. How could it be? I have never needed care and not gotten it. I have never been a caregiver and had to decide whom to apportion it out to. I have never been responsible for much, it turns out, beyond my own decisions about how to fill time. “I’m so many people,” Sally Draper told her father matter-of-factly in a diner just before I quit my “Mad Men” rewatch; we’re all so many people right now, and it feels like all of them are scared.