Dear Yuri,
I am taking hot baths then cold showers at 4pm or 11am; unbridled luxury. I sometimes make faces out of leftover vegetables, cook, eat cake and pretended to read. Parts of London are still busy in places, the pathways congested, the parks flanked with exercisers. People are exercising that haven’t left their sofa in 15 years, madcap slow joggers seeking muscle cramps and shin splints as they pant and jiggle through their 5k challenges. I stay at home and watch my own thoughts; a watcher of my own mind. Those days of punishing achievement have been paused, the fitness regime noose is looser, the list of tasks dissipated like an oil slick in the ocean that can’t quite all be located. An occasional bird with their plumage coated in sticky, greasy slime appears as a reminder of something that everyone tries to forget.
The night sky is still here, the stars and Venus a reminder that our lives are like small trinkets, that we can have faith in chaos, that only light can vanquish darkness and that in the quiet a community can still be forged. Neighbours helping neighbours in this monkhood of remoteness. I am reminded daily that there is a time for everything; a time to be born and a time to die, to plant and uproot, to embrace and refrain, to be silent and to speak.
Some days, to pass this time I spend hours digging the earth in my small garden, pulling up weeds from a patch of this soil that we call home but the seeds that I have ordered never arrive, day after day the soil looks at me, bare and waiting, anticipating growth. Remaining and Lingering. What kind of metaphor is this?