Day 14

So, my trusty journal, we've come through two full weeks of isolation together.

In that time, besides my delightful habitat mate, I saw a couple of coworkers once briefly. I spoke with one teller at the supermarket. I waved from the window at a friend while she dropped off a stack of office supplies. I exchanged a handful of nods and smiles with neighbors, from a safe distance.

It makes for a good story of stoic perseverance. Which is why posterity should know I spent almost every minute of today in conversation with someone. There was a time this afternoon when I was simultaneously enjoying three text threads, a barrage of incoming video messages, a string of serial phone calls, and a logarithmically expanding email inbox. All of this with people I like.

If I come to you, my journal, and write about how isolation is a bleak and lonely precipice, tell me to sell it somewhere else.

Except. Every face in the world, save one, is made of little pixels now, and the voices on the phone are surgically trimmed of sound below 300 hertz, and above 3400. Did you know, my intrepid journal, that in speech my voice does its fundamental dance around 100 hertz? Several times the Post Office has delivered to me, with apologies, the bagged remains of a letter torn to pieces by the sorting machines. That, more or less, is how the telephone delivers every call.

Now I understand the natural senses always lacked fidelity, that experience is manufactured in the brain, that consciousness is basically a well-researched work of fiction. I know that sight was never really seeing. Touch was never really touching. It doesn't matter. I can tell you, when this is over and we all get to see real humans again, in real chairs, in real rooms, there's going to be trouble. Unaccustomed to the uncut distillate, people are going to overdose. If we get the all-clear, as I fear, on a sunny afternoon in June, God help us all.

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Day 13