Quarantine

I feel it as soon as I roll over and swing my legs over the edge of the bed: My back is tight.

I pretend it’s simple as having slept the wrong way as I walk gingerly down the hall, but considering I can’t quite straighten to full height there’s no avoiding the truth for long. When I get to the bathroom, I grip the edge of the sink with one hand and run the fingers of the other across the horizon of my lower back. I feel it just past the midpoint on the right side — a hard lump. I listen to it make a popping noise as I worry it back and forth under the pads of my fingers. It’s a small knot that’s resurfaced in the spot where an acute back spasm had debilitated me two weeks ago.

I had been planning to run 10K this morning and then spend the day on my feet in the kitchen trying a new vegan gnocchi recipe and cranking out a few tried-and-trues for meals during the week ahead. I hope the knot will loosen with a bit of stretching. Still holding the edge of the sink, I reach for the towel bar with my other hand, resting my fingers lightly on it for balance as I arch into a standing back bend.

The sudden clatter is loud enough to wake the dead.

The hardware bolting my towel bar to the wall has let go, sending it and its cargo crashing to the ground. I close my eyes and will myself not to react. What I want is to scream, maybe cry, perhaps both. I can feel a wave of blood-red anger and resentment rising up within me. I think of every person I know who has a partner who could be called on in this moment to fix the stupid bar. I think of everyone I know whose living space encompasses multiple rooms and office space with a proper desk and chair (my original back injury was the result of sitting at my kitchen island on a stool to work at home in ergonomic hell for a month during shelter-in-place orders). I look at my dog, who has come to the doorway of the bathroom to see what all the noise is about, and wonder why she can’t take herself for a walk just this goddamned once.

What you focus on, grows.

I close my eyes and repeat this phrase to myself over and over while taking deep breaths. It’s a reminder that if I give these vitriolic thoughts real estate in my brain, they’ll multiply and take up more and more space and I will feel worse and worse. When I’ve calmed down, I open my eyes and finally do that standing back bend (holding the sink and the door handle for support this time) until the tightness in my back releases enough that I can lower more or less comfortably into a sitting position so I can pee already — which was the initial point of coming to the bathroom and I still haven’t done.

After washing my hands I brush my hair and catch it into a ponytail, noticing the grey streak on the right side is getting more pronounced. While my grey has been coming in fast and furiously these last few years, I’ve been watching a particular patch of it growing wider over these last few weeks. Next I slather on beeswax balm, a futile effort against the dry flakes currently plaguing my lips. No matter how many times a day I apply it, my upper lip remains perpetually chapped and a painful crack keeps opening up in the right corner of my mouth. I make a mental note to add Burt’s Bees to my drug-store shopping list as the mechanism on the stick spins uselessly with no more wax in the column to push upwards. I look at myself in the mirror and think reassuring that I can handle this glitch in the day. I put on a podcast, a boxer in conversation about mindset and navigating only the present moment — filling my head with the positive talk of others is one of my strategies for eliminating space taken up by my own negative chatter — and then I set out down the hall to collect what I need to fix the towel bar.

So begins the final day of the week six in quarantine, the shelter-in-place protocol Toronto, along with the rest of North America and much of the world, has been following since the emergence of COVID-19 in late 2019 and early 2020.

In a time of fear, unprecedented economic collapse, and a disruption of daily life in just about every conceivable way, I’m in an enviable position: I haven’t lost my job and needed to apply for any of the emergency financial relief. I’ve been single for the last eight years, so being alone day in and day out is routine. Food-gathering and cooking for myself is both a long-standing pastime and a budget strategy, so I’m at no loss to prepare my own meals. Have you seen the memes circulating on social media about single people in quarantine? You know the ones — where people with partners and children come out of isolation looking like Leo DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass from The Revenant, all bloodied and broken, while single people, by comparison, emerge with all the slick, suave composure of his Gatsby instead? Yeah. It’s people like me and my situation that are the source of those memes.

Except what those memes fail to take into account is all the ways being alone in isolation pushes you to the mental and emotional brink, even when being alone is something you’re a subject-matter expert in.

I feel the loss of my in-person social networks keenly. It takes an extraordinary relationship with one’s own self to live a healthy solo life. You have to be comfortable being inside your own heart and mind and navigating the patterns and conflicts and questions that arise continually without the daily machinations of a relationship to hide behind. I don’t fear that interaction within my own self; in fact, I’m largely content with it. But independence, in its physical and metaphysical forms, is hard, sustained work, and for me it’s balanced best by the time I spend not on my own — at the office on weekdays, integrated with a team of others; with my coach twice a week, pushing my physical and mental limits; with friends occasionally, when hugs are given in parting. Video conferencing for work and social hours is turning out to be a sustaining mechanism, to be sure, but for those of us with no other human in our midst otherwise, it cannot replace in-person interaction wholesale.

That is what the insensitive memes fail to recognize.

I’ve tried to mitigate this cavernous absence by doing quarantine right and keeping my life structured. Work has forged on for me through this time of C-19 — has been extremely busy, in fact, as we close in on our April 30 fiscal year-end — and so it’s been easy to fill 8 to 10 hours of the day. Though it is certainly not business as usual — one of the best phrases I’ve heard to describe it is that we’re not working from home in a crisis; we’re at home in a crisis trying to work — I’m deeply grateful I don’t have to worry about how to pay next month’s rent or buy next week’s groceries. I’m also trying to keep a baseline of fitness. Daily I walk the dog for an hour and half in the morning and the evening, run a handful of kilometres, and do strength work programmed by my coach, and I’ve no doubt this physical routine has kept me anchored in relative mental and emotional stability, even on the days when I’m teetering at the edge. On the weekends I cook, clean, do laundry, and try to knock off one documentary on the to-watch list I’ve been accumulating for the better part of two years. Creatively, I’ve not had the capacity to write or read so I’ve taken on a photo project instead, photographing one mural a day painted on the Gardiner Expressway girders that decorate my neighbourhood.

It’s a tight routine and I’m aware of the subtle digs that come with comments like “It must be nice” directed at the social media posts of my artfully arranged dinner plates or “Hard pass” on my maintaining my push-up strength from my makeshift home gym space. I get it. How I spend my isolation time is not how everyone else would, or can. But in the absence of a family dinner to sit down to or a masked walk to take alongside someone else, gloved hand in gloved hand, this is what fills my hours.

It’s why having thrown my back out, and having it flare up again after thinking it was sorted, nearly broke me on a Sunday morning. The routine I’ve created may make it look like I’ve got it all together and am sailing easily through quarantine. But rather it’s the routine I’ve created preventing me from breaking into pieces at the stress created by all the things that are currently out of our control.

I kneel down, carefully, in my bathroom with a butter knife in hand. Its tip fits the tiny screw head on the underside of the towel bar and its slender handle turns more easily in the awkward, tight space than my screwdriver. I listen to the boxer talk about letting everything go except what you have the ability to harness in the present moment.

I grip the newly attached towel bar and jiggle it up and down, testing its hold strength. It doesn’t move. I rehang the towels and get dressed. It’s time to take Tilda for walk and start another day in quarantine.