Rosie Field
Beaconsfield, UK
Quarantine is being a fly stuck in amber, time just stops, everything just stops. You can hear
the tick of the clock, faint and far away, not touching you in your cocoon.
There’s nothing to do, there’s never anything to do, so you fill your day up with menial tasks.
Get up, brush your teeth, watch netflix in your pajamas, anything to make the next eternity of
nothing bearable, as the sun goes up and down and up and down outside your window.
Before you know it, a week has passed. While you were living it felt like a decade and
looking back on it feels like 3 seconds. And you’ve accomplished so little it’s hardly
compensable. In a life where we’re constantly running at full speed on a treadmill, what can
you do when the treadmill stops? When you can contemplate your arbitrary endless run to
nothing, staring at a blank wall? What can you do when your perspective explodes outward,
yet you are confined to your room? You can’t help but pray to go back to tunnel vision, and
distraction, and stress.
Humanity invented entertainment was so we wouldn’t have to think. That’s why in spite of
Howard Beale, Miller and Nietzsche we’re satisfied to continue to pick the blue pill of TV
from now until the end. But quarantine has desensitised us. Normally you can put in your
airpods and wait out the storm until the next morning, nihilism always looks a bit crap in the
light of day. But quarantine picks you up like Dorothy, and there’s no easy yellow brick road,
in fact you’re never let out of the tornado.
Despite all the sunny skies of spring, if you look past the light, the incessant British rain is
falling and doesn’t seem like it’s stopping.
