happy birthday to youuu, COVID-19!

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! Sorry, going to be a bit of a whiplash experience here, as the essay below is about something serious and quite important, but I wanted to talk about something whimsical first. You know how it is.

So - I've had this thing for a long time which I'd never bothered googling, because I sort of assumed that it was my brain being weird again, and I didn't believe the internet would help me understand it in any way.

As it turns out, I was both right and wrong; right, because no-one knows why this thing happens, but wrong, because it turns out it's quite a common phenomenon, so now I feel less alone. The "thing" in question is that, if I fancy someone, I can't picture their face. How weird is that? To answer some questions you may have:

I have no problem picturing the faces of friends, relatives and acquaintances. I have, if anything, quite a good memory for faces. I have no problem recognising someone I have a crush on when I see them. By "crush" here I both mean someone I may fancy from afar, but also someone I may know, er, biblically. It doesn't apply to former partners: if anything, my temporary lack of object permanence usually stops once I stop fancying someone. That's how I know I've stopped fancying them. It also doesn't apply if I'm actively in a relationship with someone - thank god.

Anyway, as google has now taught me, there are many people who share this bewildering condition. I wasn't able to find anything properly fascinating on the topic, but this piece and that one were reasonably interesting. The point both of them make is that we can try and hazard a guess, but ultimately we have no idea why some people can picture their crushes, and others can't. Isn't that fantastic! Just never gets boring, does it? Being human. What a joyride it is.

Right I couldn't think of a neat segue between the week's two topics so instead I will simply say: the first coronavirus lockdown started five years ago this week, and we, at Young Vulgarian Towers, thought we should probably mark the occasion in some way. Yes, I'm using the royal "we". Obviously. We thought about what we wanted to do for a while, then eventually realised that there isn't much to say right now that wasn't said at the time.

Back in May 2020, when I was maybe at my maddest, I wrote a weird and sad essay on how I was feeling, because I assumed I would want a record of my mental state at the time. I was entirely right! I'm pleased I put those mostly harrowing thoughts into words.

For context, if you weren't aware of my general existence at the time: I moved into a little one bedroom flat by myself at the beginning of March 2020. I'd never lived alone until that point. When I say the flat was little, I really mean it: it was a basement flat and the bedroom had no windows, and the bathtub was so small even I, at 5'4, struggled to comfortably take a bath in it. The kitchen was a tiny little square in which two people could not stand at the same time, like one of those old Parisian lifts.

I spent months of my life mostly locked in that little flat, entirely alone, and I lost my mind. I decided to barely edit the essay below, which was originally published on Medium, as I wanted to keep it as pristine as possible. The only changes I've made are very minor, and mostly to do with style, as it turns out your prose can get a bit janky if you're feeling insane.

And…that's all I need to say I think! The essay will speak for itself. Back then I called it "At sea." It was published on May 2, 2020. Oh, and if you squint, you may see traces of what would eventually become Escape, my book on the internet. Foreshadowing!

A column

I feel I should be writing a diary of all this, because why shouldn’t I? I write and I live, and as there is little to live for at the moment I must write; we write to remember how we lived, and I dearly hope we won’t have to live like this again.

Should I be writing in French? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this recently, about the fact that the words I was created in now slip away from my fingers when I try to grab them. I hungrily tried to grasp English words when I moved here and in doing so I dropped the ones I already had.

I don’t know who I'm writing this for — for the imaginary audience of people I know currently exist but cannot currently see or touch, or for the person I know I will become eventually, but who is currently a stranger.

I’ve been struggling to write since this started as writing is reaching out, and I'm not sure it's something I want to do. I have retreated into my own head, into my own body, and being reminded of the existence of others unsettles me.

I don't see friends on video calls, nor do I join boozy quizzes after dinner; I don't want to watch my friends’ faces on screen, just like I think that having low-fat ice cream is even worse than having no ice cream at all.

I dislike grey areas because I like order and answers and certainty, and so I speak to my mother every other day and my grandmother every week and my father every other week, as I always have done, and I bury my head in the sand.

I bury my arms and my chest and my legs in the sand; I live a very small life because it feels better than constantly fighting to make my life a little bit bigger, Zoom by Zoom, call by call.

My body is my companion and I think about it a lot. I am thinner and fitter than I have ever been, because my companion is a beast that must be fought and fed every day, so that at night it can rest.

Every morning I wake up and I am conscious of my body, of how much it used to see and touch and feel, and how hard and lean it is becoming. This is not a time to be soft.

I wonder, when I'm sad, if what I am feeling is akin to the waning of flowers; left without the sun or the spaces I once inhabited, I start to wilt. Deep down I know that I'm not doing all this exercise for myself; I am doing it like I'm writing this, for an audience I imagine exists somewhere.

One day my body will come out of the sand and people will be impressed by what it has become; I need it to become better than it was because I need some good to come out of this. I don't understand those arguing we should spend this time being idle, and in my crueller moments I despise them.

What are trials for if not to make you stronger? Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, but if you don't construct a reason for everything that has happened to you, I'm not sure how you keep on living.

My world is very small and it means that I can control it I can do work that I will look back on and be proud of, I can shape my body, I can do some silly little drawings to pretend that I allowed myself some down time.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about things to compare this to; for some reason my brain was wired to always lean towards metaphors and comparisons. Writing this has made me realise something; I am living through this like an artist is preparing for an exhibition.

“My lockdown” is a performance piece, being trialled now so that it can be shown later. Where there would be paintings on a wall there are my arms getting stronger and my waist getting thinner.

Where there would be statues being polished, there are the work projects I am obsessively working on, so that they look impressive when they're done. Where there would be sketches, there are the tattoos I did on myself, the plants I bought and am keeping alive, the new meals I am learning how to make. Hearts starve as well as bodies, and all that.

I'm not sure who this exhibition is for yet; is it for the friends I will see when this is over? Will I give them a tour of the rooms, showing them what was achieved when they couldn’t see me even on screens?

Or perhaps I am the person I have in mind, and all of these are offerings to the future historian I will become, ensuring that I can look back on those months and feel safe in the knowledge that I did not waste them.

There is so little time and there is so much in me; I may not strive for greatness but I do yearn for perpetual motion, and giving up on it now would feel like a betrayal of the person I am working on becoming.

In years to come I want to look at those walls and see what was achieved; never the lemons, always the lemonade. Still, it's hard to put into words how I am feeling right now, as now isn't a time for minds.

When your body screams to be released there is little else to be heard; my most interesting thoughts were often had on crowded tube platforms, at the end of days that felt they would never end, so exhausted there was nothing left but sudden epiphanies.

I don’t enjoy standing still not because I am afraid of it, but because movement is what keeps me alive; the more I do, the more I want to keep doing. Resting is only worth it when you know what you’re resting for; a gulp of water never feels as good as when you know you’ve got to keep running.

This is, I suppose, a letter to the person nearing the finish line, and reminiscing about the race. Writing it is an attempt to insert the present tense into the narrative, of remaining aware that this is merely a chapter and that others will come afterwards.

This is mostly for me but I know I will probably end up publishing it somewhere even though, if I'm being frank, I don't know why I would. Sometimes words only gain meaning when they are heard by others; sometimes a thought isn’t enough and it must be spoken to become real.

Sometimes I publish words online and in the seconds after hitting “send”, I feel my rib cage opening, and my insides being shown to the world, like a carcass hanging from a hook. That's when I know I’ve bared too much of myself, but I can never quite tell when it will happen.

Sometimes words come out and only the sound of them makes me realise they shouldn’t have left my mouth. I often think about why some of us share so much of ourselves online; I wish I knew why I share so much of myself online.

I worry about turning myself into a spectacle, about ripping my ribs open when no-one asked me to. In darker moments I see it as desperate attempts to foster immediate intimacy, from someone who isn’t very good at forming relationships.

I have no idea if that’s the case; if I’m being kinder to myself, I simply see it as a habit that I have, because I have always had it, because I am of the generation that grew up pouring its secrets into screens, and right now screens are all we have.

There is something to be written about the internet once being where we went to escape from our real lives, and presently being the one place we go to in order to try and cling on to those real lives. Throwing bottles into the sea and hoping to find others; pouring our hearts onto pieces of paper then handing them out to the ocean.

Maybe this is where I am going with this; it isn't a diary or a future exhibition, but private prayers and thoughts and hopes sent overboard when the waters were choppy, written because they forced me to focus on a time and place where the waves will have ceased.

Messages in bottles are, at heart, a selfish endeavour; we have no idea who will read them but we know that the hope that someone comes across them will soothe our hearts. And with this I realise that, between my mentions of the sand and the sea, it's clear that I long for the ocean.

The last thing I did before this started was to escape to Whitstable for three days, because in dire times nothing calms the soul quite like the beach. I think this will be my first and last despatch from these times; from now on I will write shorter missives and keep them in a pile, wait until I can throw them into the waves once this is all over.

It doesn't really matter if I don’t do it in the end; they will just remind me of the hope that lies ahead.