Day 83

When isolation started, I thought the danger was I’d be bored or lonely. I have been sometimes bored, and sometimes lonely, but I think I missed how hard it would be to fight against being self-absorbed. Me and the habitat-mate, we’re the two characters in the show. Every little thing that happens to us is a magnified event, while it gets harder to grasp that the world is still real beyond the view from our window.

Apparently, the world goes on.

My city is unraveling, and at the same time gathering up the loose yarn and weaving it again into something new.

For months, I’ve been doing right by staying home and keeping away from others. Now, so many people I respect are outside together, amplifying the message that black lives matter; that peace is not peace if it excludes those on the margins; that order, paid for by someone else’s unoffered sacrifice, is violence.

What rightness needs today is hard to see. The wrongness of going out meets the wrongness of staying silent meets the wrongness of supporting mayhem meets the wrongness of supporting brutality.

What’s clear is that I’ve been privileged to take sanctuary in my own castle tower, while others have no such protection, whether from the Dread Virus or the older, more constant hounding of injustice.

How to feel about my tower I can hardly say. It’s a welcome stronghold and a cell and a monument to inequality. At the least, it has a window. If I shout from here, I can hear my voice echoing off the rooftops.