Quarantine Diaries: Three, Time Warp
The Coronavirus dreams are real. Are you experiencing this too? I've had the most insane lucid dreams that leave me with this unsettled feeling throughout the day. They linger like a foggy memory like something terrible happened that I can't quite remember clearly then when I go to lay my head down at night, the dreams start flooding back. As if reality isn't anxiety-inducing enough, I have this whole second world that my subconscious has created to contend with.
It's a strange thing how much our world seems to have shrunk. We live in bubbles now, not spheres. Getting our social contact, our information, our everything from tiny screens. I feel like I'm living in Fahrenheit 451. This is the dystopian future. And at the same time. It's the 1800's again. I'm attempting (and failing) to bake my own bread, to grow my own produce. Homesteading as my great grandparents did but in a tiny urban plot. We live in a Victorian from the 1800s, and my husband keeps commenting that this is how they must have lived. Sitting in the same kitchen and kneading dough. I wonder if they swore as much under their breath in this house as I do now. I wonder if they wore their going out clothes inside or if they had an equivalent to my sweatpants. I'm sure they would be horrified by sweatpants.
This time warp is felt in other ways too. Does anyone else feel as though they're struggling to learn a million new skills at once? Basic skills that we had essentially replaced with technology and outsourced in the name of efficiency and, at the same time, tech skills that make us feel like we're always playing catch-up. Jumping back in time to pick up something we dropped, jumping forward to figure out what's next. Teachers attempting to engage students over Zoom, meal planning and prepping food to last for two weeks, Shopify to move a brick and mortar store online, picking up an actual telephone to catch up with your friends. Back and forth, while what we once considered our present reality is in a state of suspended animation. Unable to rely on the way we've all been living out our present lives, so we look to the past then look to the future to figure out a way to get by.
The one bright spot in all of this is that we're learning. When all you know is suddenly and unceremoniously uprooted in the span of a few short weeks, you dig deep. You find your resilience. You pivot and create. You bend so that you don't break, and hopefully, you come out, in the end, a little stronger, a little wiser, a bit better than the way you went in. If nothing else, I now know how to make pasta from scratch. It isn't nearly as hard as I've always made it out to be, and it's delicious.
