Lockdown

She starts arguments with him a lot during lockdown. He is a guy she is seeing casually, and now he’s in a different country and they have little to talk about. There is little point in them talking at all, but she keeps up an incessant regime of messaging to assert control.

Nothing is going on; there’s no offices, no structures or friends holding up the scaffolding of their fragile relationship. No distractions to shield the worst parts.

She works all day and then the evening is play time. She tells him she thinks the economy can’t be shut down forever. He doesn’t like this and says people are dying. She can’t equate death with life in the same way he can, and she continues to drink her wine in silence.

Scenes of hospitals in Italy appear on the TV. A warning to stay at home. People hosting zoom calls. WhatsApp buzzes with messages. She sits on her phone. People message saying how awful it is. She might as well be on Mars in her indifference.

She looks up only if someone enters the living room, which they rarely do. Her mum comes in sometimes and tries to make conversation, then leaves when she gets nothing back.

She tells herself the wine is deserved for a hard day of home working, that it’s not a survival mechanism or a liquid grip to sanity. This is the new normal.

At night, she tries to imagine dying with Coronavirus. How would it feel to have this intruder sit on her lungs and collapse her, like a pin bursting a balloon?

To bring her idea to life, she packs her suitcase full to the brim and lies down. She puts it on top of her. The wheels crush her chest. It’s very uncomfortable. She removes the suitcase. She rolls over and sleeps. It’s 3am.

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There’s nothing to do on Saturday night, so she thinks she might as well make him feel bad.

She has grand plans about it all day as she sits working; things she’ll say. She looks forward to the cold white wine filling her organs and giving her courage.

It never goes as she wants it to. It usually starts as a debate around covid, and quickly descends into something deeper and more personal. She wonders if he realises that this is not about the virus, but an attempt to address their volatile and fragile relationship. It annoys her that he plays video games and gets high all the time. It annoys her that he doesn’t express anger at the lockdown. She wonders if he feels it but gets validation from being stoic and maintaining that this is the right thing to do. She wonders if he likes feeling above her. She wonders if like her he enjoys suffering.

She doesn’t understand what right thing to do means. Suffering to her has always been inevitable. Maybe some won’t die, but she can’t get away from the niggling knowledge that people will die in another way. Physically they will be intact, mentally they’ll be a shell; reduced to 10am zoom calls and one walk a day. She dislikes the filtered scenes of people exercising and playing guitars on tv. Maybe you speak to someone in person, maybe you won’t. Maybe she’ll text him again.

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He’d probably squirm at the word relationship. She doesn’t use it around him. He uses words like situation and agreement. As if they’re bound by a contract. He’s incapable of seeing her as a serious partner, probably because he sees her as a fully human person. She isn’t sure how she feels about this. As time goes on in lockdown, his flaws become more apparent through his erratic texts and lack of commitment.

He’s seen too much, and she knows that there’s no taking it back. She thinks about this a lot. How if she just said one thing differently, maybe 5 months ago, or held back, or acted aloof instead of wanting maybe he’d see her differently. Maybe they wouldn’t be in lockdown. Then she thinks this is ridiculous and goes back to what she was doing before; drinking wine, looking at the wall or at her laptop.

Most of the stuff on her screen doesn’t stick. She sees images and text but it all becomes one swirly puff of garble; even things her friends post don’t elicit emotion. She’s seen too much. She remembers when she used to get excited at friends posts. A snap from Spain. A new relationship status. Now she merely looks because it’s what she’s used to doing; she can’t think how to fill the time in other ways. Hours pass and she scrolls; consuming everything, seeing nothing. It takes her til 1am most nights to sleep.

When she wakes up she forgets about him for a few seconds. He appears in fragments. Texts he sent, remnants of their latest fight. It’s funny because they have never fought in person, but since she’s moved back in with her parents she is bored and annoyed. There is little room in her house for expression or anger, so she turns to her phone and directs it at him. She’d never admit she enjoys seeing his name and his angry messages. It shows her that he at least still cares; he’s in a different country but he can still express outrage at her theories or opinions.

He doesn’t like it when she expresses herself fully. When she does, he often can’t handle it. She wonders why her dislike of a virus shutting everything down annoys him. She wonders if she were a male friend whether he’d react the same way to her opinion, or if the fact that she is a woman who can’t bring herself to feel the horror of death is what angers him so much. She should be soft and sensitive and she is not. She should be fearful. She wonders if he is right.

She isn’t sure what right is. She reads an article at 11pm about how ibuprofen can make Coronavirus worse. She takes 3 just to make sure she doesn’t have it. She wonders how she’d know if she has it. She might die, but then she wouldn’t know.

She stays awake trying to feel things. Sometimes feelings come so rapidly that she can’t understand what’s happening.

Sometimes she sends provocative messages to him just to wake up her senses; like a shot of espresso to her nervous system. He doesn’t understand her. She is obsessed with him saying the things she wants him to say. He very rarely does; if they were out of synch in real life, they are worse via text, this much she knows. It doesn’t stop her speedy fingers.

She tries to picture herself saying the things she texts him to his face. She can’t. She calls him entitled. She believes it, but never had courage nor reason to say it before. He stops replying during their worst fight and she knows she has gone too far. She should leave it, but she wants him to respond. When he doesn’t, she feels empty.

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The next day it’s like it didn’t happen. She will win him back. She’ll apologise and say she was drunk, even if she wasn’t.

She is mentally fragile, she is struggling. Let me explain. This isn’t me. The lockdown is getting to me. Let’s not fight. Please.

Once he sees her as weak again, she stops being scary to him, and he forgives her.