This wasn't supposed to happen to me. Living alone, I didn't even have the worry of spreading it in my household. I was safe and probably harmless, or so I thought. But I still kept my distance. I stayed at home for a full two weeks, only left the house twice to stock up on groceries, never straying further than 200 metres from my house. All my friends were just as diligent, and they were as much in good health as I was. That's why the idea of going up to the hill for a cheeky picnic with 2 friends seemed like a fairly safe bet for us. We'd all been playing it safe, what's the worst that could happen?
Yet, suddenly something seemed to have happened and people began to be frightened, even terrified. Although what precisely had happened wasn’t quite clear. The differences, between this new world and the old one, were few and subtle and appeared day by day, one by one. Initially, mainly the colours had changed: the sky and the sea had become blue, the foxes, red and the birds, silver. But, as time went on the changes became increasingly less delightful…
Spring had been, to all intents and purposes, cancelled. I had found myself canceling all the plans that I had so meticulously laid out for the months ahead. No more jet-setting here and there, treating the European free movement area as my own back garden. Now, my only back garden would be the real back garden, now overgrown, that I had neglected all these years. The days went on, with nothing to set them apart aside from the different shades of alarm and confusion. Sometimes, inexplicably, I felt joy.
The kind of joy I felt was similar to that children feel when they find themselves home alone and are old enough to not be scared and young enough to enjoy every single minute of this newly found, temporary, freedom; a freedom characterised precisely by the lack of adults, rules and regulations. In other words, the freedom to do all those small, enjoyable, things that are usually “prohibited”. Therefore, as a child, I began carrying out small acts of rebellion every day. What I was rebelling against were the regulations imposed on me by my own routines. I started taking long baths instead of quick morning showers, dancing instead of exercising, drawing instead of writing, dreaming instead of thinking, singing instead of talking (a bit weird), crawling instead of walking (very weird), drinking instead of eating (bad) smoking instead of breathing (very bad), and so on….. As I continued with my intimate rebellion, I began to notice that my little acts turned darker, unhealthier and more grotesque by the day. Thus, I panicked. Where was all this darkness coming from? I asked myself.
Had I really become so detached from my self? Once all the edifice of modern life had been stripped away, all the comforts, the luxuries, the frustrations that made me who I was, what else was left? Was I really so hollow? It struck me then that just as I was filling up my life on the outside, I'd completely forgotten what was on the inside. The thing is, the stuff on the outside is fickle, it can blow away and - as we found out so alarmingly - it only takes a few weeks for the whole lot to vanish, and who knows if it will ever come back? But the stuff on the inside, that stays there no matter what. So if I couldn't go outward I decided that I might as well go inward. I realised that it was easy to enjoy other people; the hard bit was learning to enjoy myself.
This piece has been written through a writing game consisting of two or more authors building on each other’s paragraphs without knowing their contents, besides their last sentences. For instance, the paragraph starting with “Yet, suddenly something seemed to have happened” is the result of Beatrice building up on Gabriel’s question “We'd all been playing it safe, what's the worst that could happen?. Equally, Gabriel’s paragraph starting with “Spring had been, to all intents and purposes, cancelled.” is the result of him building up on Beatrice’s “ But, as time went on the changes became increasingly less delightful…”, and so on…