Life has been a giant hourglass these past few weeks. I just turn it over whenever I wake up. It shocked me a bit to see it was already Tuesday. What happened to the weekend?
I’m just trying to make the most of this. Half the world has been forced to stay home. There’s something sickeningly funny about that. Maybe because I’ve been quite isolated all my life and so these hours I have free to do whatever I want, not having to drag myself to work daily in order to pay my staggering bills, have so far been glorious for me. I have read nine books. I have binged on Netflix and whiled away hours on games. I even painted with coffee.
Is this what retirement will be like?
I never would have guessed a pandemic would make me realise one of my dreams (the forced sabbatical, not the disease!). Meh. I have worked for ten years and two weeks was the longest I ever could manage to get off my jobs. How self-centered am I? I know other people are dying, and this is quite of a big deal but a part of me keeps rejoicing. I am a turtle, happy to retreat inside my shell. It is because like always, I feel distant from the world. Like how I’ve always felt, watching others live life as I sit here with a bag of chips, trying and failing, yet again, to understand how they manage to swing it. Sometimes I even feel distant from myself, like I’m some robot I scorn at going about her days, dressing in my clothes, speaking with my voice.
Why am I even doing this self-indulgent thing? Just the books. Reading always inspires me to write. My mind overflows. I have not read books for months before this lock down. After the stresses of daily work and commute and socializing, I usually just collapse on my couch and have Netflix hypnotise me into idiocy. But how quickly I have fallen back into the old habit. How could I have forgotten my love for literature? So you see? One can never really get bored. There are so many universes to get lost into between the pages and chapters.
So that is my realization. I could live like this, needing not to confront my social anxieties on a daily basis. Just whiling hours, days and nights blurring, in the company of authors and showmakers. Bless the internet. Aren’t we lucky? Privileged really… that we have been struck by this at this day and age?
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