I was struggling with quarantine — until I found the polar explorers.
I was struggling with quarantine — until I found the polar explorers.
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transcript
How to Be Alone
I was struggling with quarantine — until I found the polar explorers.
It’s been seven days. 12 days. 26 days. 47 days. 55 days. Alone in my house. Every morning in quarantine, I wake up at 7:00. OK, maybe at 8:00, or at least before 9:00. I try my best to shower first, or maybe I should exercise first or maybe I should eat first. But there’s nothing in the fridge except for five jars of Indian pickles. I should write first. Maya Angelou always wrote first thing in the morning. And Susan Sontag. And Ernest Hemingway. But fuck Hemingway. Did my unemployment card arrive yet? No? OK, deep breath. I’ll just meditate. Everything will be better if I meditate. Well, it’s 11:00 a.m. now and all I’ve done is text my ex-boyfriend and overbrew a cup of green tea. I should get some sun. The sun fixes everything, simplifies things. I’ll stand in that alley with my face up to the light and savor the colors behind my eyelids — orange, green, red, like a mango. My dad grew up on a mango grove in Pakistan, and he’s described it so vividly to me — the rustling of the trees, the shade keeping him cool on the hottest Shikarpur days — that I often find myself nostalgic for the mango grove. Even though I’ve never been to my dad’s childhood home. Even though it doesn’t exist anymore. Nostalgia is a funny thing. I used to think it was reserved for the distant past. But what I’ve learned in quarantine is that you can be nostalgic for things that never happened — your 27th birthday party, the family trip you’d planned to Peru. Nostalgic for running down a New England hill with your six-year-old niece. Driving through the Midwest to meet the newest member of your family. Plans so clear that when they fall apart, they still feel like memories, as vibrant and loud as if they’d really happened. At 1:00 p.m. I look up at the telephone wires above my house. Perfectly perched on them is a hummingbird, his heart beating 1,260 times per minute. I stay as still as possible, bracing myself for him to fly away. But he stays and stays and stays. And I get to study him. His elongated beak, like a question posed for the flowers. His insanely electric colors. I count 256 shades of blue. As each minute expires, I find myself beginning to trust him, that he won’t leave. And then that asshole flies away, and I’m alone again. And I wish I was better at being alone. [PHONE RINGING] “You definitely always wanted to be held. You wanted to be on my arms, on my hip, in my lap, in anyone’s arms, actually. You just really wanted to have, I think, touch.” Some experts say that to survive this time, we should turn to the field of polar psychology, to the strategies of Antarctic dwellers. Antarctica, home to researchers and future astronauts. They train for life in space on the white continent, an analogue for off-planet existence, as close to Mars as we can get. Life on Antarctica means isolation, dependence on external supplies, confinement to small groups and spaces, restricted mobility, and limited social contact, a total disruption of routines, recreational, social, professional, sexual. Sounds kind of familiar. Winter-over syndrome is what they call the psychological condition that creeps up during the six sunless months of Antarctic winter — insomnia, depression, irritability, reduced physical and cognitive acuity and fugue states. People see ghosts, brains manufacturing social experiences as a last-ditch attempt to preserve sanity. Or they hallucinate. The lack of stimuli making internal experiences appear external. And then there’s the Antarctic stare. A 20-foot stare in a 10-foot room. But even when time unravels and the days disintegrate, indistinguishable, and when just the thought of reaching out and touching someone you love causes your heart to ride the elevator from your chest to your throat where it barely fits, even then, what the Antarctic expeditioners and the space explorers tell us is that there is still beauty. Even in microgravity, when the 10% drop of Earth’s governing force causes astronauts’ eyeballs to flatten, blurring their vision, there is still beauty. Flowers smell extraordinary in space. Crystals grow larger. Flames are shaped differently, spherical at the top, softened without that same burden of gravitational pull. And then for many, there’s a kind of beauty that follows them when they return home. They call it post-return growth, owing to a newfound cosmic perspective spurred by reflections on purpose and fundamental questions of value. As one explorer wrote in 1912, ‘What is worth what?’ When quarantine is over, I’ll be a different person. One who doesn’t take for granted the feeling of bumping up against a stranger in the supermarket. One who touches her friends a lot, maybe too much. And I won’t wish I needed other people less, to see them up close, to hear our laughter rising towards the same ceiling, blending into a singular sound, because I’ve been to space. I’ve waited out winter in Antarctica. And I know what is worth what. [MUSIC PLAYING]
How to Be Alone
I was struggling with quarantine — until I found the polar explorers.
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