It hasn’t been quite the triumphant return I was planning.
Two weeks ago, I had the entirety of December and most of January booked up with plans, to reunite and catch up and go out and get drunk. And now… nothing. This week in particular, everyone is hiding out at home so they don’t catch my germs and prevent themselves from going home for Christmas. At least my sister is around, who has to spend Christmas with me and my germs anyway.
London, like everywhere, is a pretty wild place to be right now. The streets are dead, stations are packed with people trying to jump on a train before Boris tells them they can’t, people cross the road when they see you walking towards them in case you breathe on them. Nothing new for us, sadly, rather a complete déjà vu to a time that was almost fun in its novelty, two years ago, but which now is tired and old. And having people cross the street when you walk towards them, when you’re essentially alone in an empty flat, starts to hurt your feelings after a while.
At the beginning of this hellscape we’re now all accustomed to, on the weekends where my roommate’s boyfriend would longboard two hours to Brooklyn from Queens to spend a few days with her, I would find myself with long stretches of time spent completely alone. I would plug in my headphones and go on endless circular walks around the neighbourhood, striking out in a different direction each time, but realizing quickly that there are only two directions you can go in when you leave your house: left or right. I would put on a podcast, an old, familiar one, and it would almost feel like having company, hearing the bantering between show hosts as they trotted out old jokes I knew back to front, laughing when they laughed, a little social gathering in my head when there were none in real life. It made me feel less alone, for the short time I wasn’t lying on my bed glaring at the ceiling.
And now here we are again. My housemates all fled the city last weekend while I was in Bristol in case the rules changed again, so I’m in an empty apartment for the foreseeable future, not speaking out loud for hours unless someone calls me or I go to the shops to buy something to kill a few minutes. In this state I’m always more open and friendly, exchanging an eyebrow raise with a stranger above our masked mouths, or asking a bus driver how they’re doing. It’s sad that this nominal form of politeness is always borne out of desperation, a want and a need to feel like you’re a solid body walking around, not just a puff of vapour that someone could pass right through. On the bus home the other night the driver pulled over and turned all the lights off to go for a piss, and I had to awkwardly raise my hand like I was in school to alert him to the fact that I was still there, that I wasn’t home yet.
When I was much younger, I would always make sure I went to bed well before everyone else, because I couldn’t get to sleep if the house was silent. I needed to hear the low hum of voices drifting up the stairs, bottles being opened, kettles being boiled, my parents pottering around and getting ready for bed. It’s much harder to fall asleep when it doesn’t matter what time you get up the next day, or if you even do, because there’s no-one present to notice.
That was a very maudlin, violin-playing paragraph. I’m going to my sister’s house for Christmas day, which will be lovely, and gradually everyone else I know will come out of their winter hibernation and I’ll start using my voice regularly again. It’s temporary, this feeling of being in a cryogenic sleep where you still have to get up and shower and feed yourself.
One night this week I was lying in my room, glaring at the ceiling, just for old time’s sake, when I heard music coming from the street outside. I opened my window and saw that someone had wheeled a piano out onto the street outside the pub on the corner, and people were gathering around to sing carols. There were only a few of them at first, but gradually more people approached or paused in their walk home, were given a stapled set of papers with lyrics on, and joined in with the singing, nudged gently in the direction of the next carol by an officious but jolly man. I leaned out of my window and watched them for ages, applauding softly whenever one carol ended, wanting to show my appreciation but also not wanting to be noticed as the weird girl hanging out of the third storey window and watching, instead of going out and joining them like a normal person. It was enough of a touchstone of human connection for that moment, enough to cross paths even from a distance with other people who were walking around and living their lives. Enough to know that kind of spirit still exists in humans, that even when confronted with the end of the world, they’ll still gather and drink mulled wine and sing carols, because it’s Christmas, and at Christmas you forget about everything else.
One good thing:
On my bus ride home, before being stranded in the dark by the driver, I rediscovered this song which was my stare-out-of-the-window-and-think-sad-thoughts song when I was 17 and just at the very beginning stages of a relationship with someone in my mum’s German class at college. I say beginning stages but what I mean is we were writing each other emotional missives ON EACH OTHER’S FACEBOOK WALLS OUT IN PUBLIC IN FRONT OF GOD AND OUR RESPECTIVE FRIENDS LISTS TO SEE. I was on a skiing holiday with my family at the time and they kept trying to talk to me in the car but I was like no I can’t talk I’m being emo.
One bad thing:
My laptop has started making this amazing screaming noise whenever I turn it on that is so loud I can’t hear the dialogue in Emily in Paris.
I mean… what? I don’t watch Emily in Paris. Haha lol bye Merry Christmas