Chapter 14: Home Alone

When the Covid lockdown forced me to sit still and look my fear of dying alone straight in the eye.

Photo by Rebe Pascual on Unsplash

Read the previous chapters here.

On that Friday, the 13th of March, 2020, Covid locked us up inside faster than the heaviest blizzard of the winter. It instantly isolated us one by one, or in small family units, like a meter-high pile of snow between two houses, preventing us from seeing or reaching one another.  

Locked up inside

After the prime minister announced the lockdown measures on TV, I threw on the first pair of sneakers I saw and rushed to the closest supermarket. The moment was both apocalyptic and strangely exciting. It felt like an online game we had all been invited to step into. I couldn’t comprehend the reality of it all, my mind protected itself from tragedy looming close. 

Once in the supermarket, I lost all reason and started taking after other people’s actions. If they put cereal boxes in their carts, I also grabbed one from the shelf. Never mind that I didn’t usually eat those types of sugared cereals; that Friday before the big lockdown I felt I might need some. Seeing people with shopping carts full of stuff, I suddenly remembered all the things I was missing too. Canned peas, which I rarely ate but what if; flour in case I’d suddenly need to make bread; frozen seaweed; vanilla sticks. The insanity had crept in, slowly taking over. 

I found myself lingering by the cosmetics section, trying to choose between two bottles of body lotion. I hadn’t bought one from a supermarket in years, but with the end of the world approaching, I might require some extra moisturizing. The collective paranoia was becoming more contagious than the virus itself. 

Peace and feeling safe are important in society because, otherwise, people turn into beasts. Peace keeps humans away from one another. Peace is like a buffer zone, a thick mattress keeping distance between the beast inside each of us. The hungry beast, the selfish one, the panicked beast. During trying times, our first instinct is not to come together, but to come apart. To fight for a pack of toilet paper or to hoard canned tuna, to the detriment of others. 

The endless river of time

I spent the next few weeks locked up in my fifth-floor flat, a micro-universe that would keep me occupied until the medical blizzard would pass. 

Anticipating I’d stay home for days on end, I created a routine so I wouldn’t waste time with useless activities or get painfully bored. We get stressed when we live under imposed limits. But when exceptional circumstances remove those limits that keep us boxed in, then we miss them and we recreate them ourselves. We build our prisoner cage back up. 

The lockdown set us free, as free as we’d ever be, we just needed to hang out within the perimeter of our own homes. And we missed the cage, the deadlines, the rules, the stress. Humans are creatures of habit, even if the habit slowly kills us. 

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Before the lockdown, the days were like big boxes, compartmentalized with smaller boxes, hours and schedules. They were marked by the morning alarm, by the time the bus would arrive, the office hours, the evening dance class starting. All, mini boxes within the bigger box of each day.

Once locked inside, all the boxes shattered and all their contents spilled over. The tight schedules of daily activities and errands disappeared into thin air. Suddenly, the phrase ‘I don’t have time’ didn’t make sense anymore. It didn’t make any difference if it was the 12th or the 23rd of March; if it was a Tuesday or a Friday. Time had recovered its nature as an endless river. 

There was no more finish line, only the present. We could plan only the next hour, the next meal, the next movie. Our society needed this return to the present moment, this return to presence. 

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I spent long stretches of time lounging in my armchair looking out at the square patch of sky I could see beyond the building in front of mine. For the first time, I got to know exactly when the sun passed in front of my windows. I noticed how the days got bigger, how the sun lingered on my living room floor for longer, a few minutes later each evening. I noticed how the light came in at a different angle when the clocks changed. I had all the time in the world to be, to notice — and also to think. A lot.

Do I have all the coins?  

Anxiety had the door wide open, to intrude on my space and inconvenience me. During one of those lockdown video calls, a close friend who knew all too well about my fear of dying alone recommended a book called Who has all my coins? The author claimed that, despite our life’s circumstances, we have all the ‘coins’ on us, everything we need to live our best lives. I fought that message hard.

I thought that if we had imperfect or downright toxic parents, we did lose some of our ‘coins’ in our childhood. Didn’t we?! If we were wronged by a lover or a friend, they did steal some more ‘coins’ from us too. I just couldn’t accept that I had all the answers inside me, all the coins on me. Surely if I had it all, I wouldn’t be afraid of loneliness, I wouldn’t panic when things didn’t go as I wished. The accountability lesson was a hard one to accept.

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During those long weeks, the only living human I saw was the supermarket cashier, on my once-weekly trip to the store. In the building, neighbors would avoid one another, holding on to dear, isolated, life. They would rather climb six flights of stairs than stand masked up for a few seconds next to another person in the elevator cabin.

Being alone, with no way of sharing my days with anyone, was precisely what I’d been running away from for the past few months. The prospect had made me dizzy with anxiety, it made me throw myself at the wrong guys, it kept me up all night in shame. And now I was forced to live exactly that. And the tragedy I imagined wasn’t there, it turned out. The message of that book my friend sent me was seeping in through my skin.

The fear of loneliness had been an iron hand holding my neck, squeezing the air out of my lungs. Thinking of dying alone had always made my breath short. But now the possibility of actually dying alone became a reality. If I got Covid and would be in real danger, nobody could come to take care of me in my last days. Facing my fear day after day, locked up inside, standing next to it while I compulsively washed my hands, it dissipated. I had tried to rationalize or control it with my mind numerous times before. But in the early days of the pandemic, while home alone for an indefinite amount of time, that fear quietly left my body.

‘Told ya you’ve got all the coins on you’, my friend playfully chirped from the other side of the screen, during our next lockdown video call.

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