I am in our end room. It has high bookshelves on one side of the room and the bed for occasional guests or restless nights on the other. I'm at the desk in between. We have a giant film poster on one wall, Un film de Marcel Camus, L'oiseau de Paradis. It's Cambodian, made in 1962, it is probably the original poster and I should not have it bluetacked to my wall where it is getting damaged. On the wall too, a small kete, postcards, a picture of a wary kestrel fallen out of some book, paper fish, cut, hand drawn and painted with watercolours by Joe. They have small metal hooks in their mouths, a remnant from one of our kid's birthday parties,
On the desk, tins with their labels scrubbed off filled with pens and pencils, none of them useful or practical ones, a can of fixative, Japanese ink still in its box, a pair of sunglasses, a cord I use as a skipping rope, a picture of my Dad. A box of bull clips. The box the bull clips are in once contained a Moomin cup. One of the pictures on the box is of a party in Moominvalley, I think it is a composite, I can't think of a scenewhere this gathering would make sense, but it does capture the essence of a Moomin party, which remains for me, the great ideal of social gatherings. It's in a garden, among huge trees which are decorated and glowing, with lights or their own fruit or flowers, I can't tell. Snufkin is lying in a tree, Moominpappa is playing the accordion, the morose Hemulen has his empty butterfly net, the terrifying Groke is hiding behind a tree, the luminescent hattifatteners are grouped like flowers on long stalks, Sniff looks on skeptically. Moominmamma is in the distance with her handbag. Strangely there is no Moomintroll. When I was a kid with a friend coming over, I would wait at the end of our driveway for them. Wanting to speed the visit up. I spent many years going to mass camping events, protests mostly, sometimes music events or dance parties, sometimes perhaps just social things. My heart would leap when I would see a field, with a fire, and glowing tents or campervans or house buses. The great unknown of what was waiting for me, of friends, of strangers. In Christchurch, for a short time I shared a house with a bunch of women art students. We'd go off to parties en masse, they were larger than life, op shop stylish, I felt like that when I was with them, powerful, our extravagance absorbed into the noise and people of a party. How the party opened to receiveour magnificence and closed around us. We became part of it. When I first visited Wellington as an adult, I found the occupation of the place, the tall buildings, the greenbelt, the streets, the cafes, the gigs, all of it thrilling. It was full of hope and mystery. Things happened here, it was like waking up. When I tramped around London, I remember swearing to myself that I would not get lost there, that this city would make room for one more bedazzled foreigner. That I would be alone but not lonely. There is something about social encounters which fed me. I knew a party or a conversation or a city could change me and that I could change it. That the event or place and I would move on each other like lovers, changed forever. We would slip under each other skins and stay there. I am made up of remembered phrases, of unexpected chiming laughter, of walks through urban tunnels, of dinner in tramping huts, of holding weeping friends through the night, of sunrises, the deep blue of a flatmate's bedroom, the smell of a shared living room, legendary picnics by rivers, Christmas dinner in a London flat, of how someone's body moved when they danced, how air lapped around another, how space was a cloak that moved with them. It was all so dazzling, perhaps because I spent most of my high school years invisible. Untouchable. Eyes would flit across me like I had a sign nothing to see here, nothing to see here, which I may in all fairness have been projecting, because invisibility was better than mockery or contempt or unaccountable venom at my unpopularity, my lack of fit. I was hated. And that was really the only kind of social attention I got. I became so small at high school, so colourless. A shy, unopinionated, frightened person. Ugly had to be quiet. My demons were called Tania or Janelle, Chris or Brent or random strangers to whom I was an affront. I was not attractive, oh no. And as a 1980s Christchurch teenage girl, I had just one job. Our New Zealand Covid-19 full lock down, dubbed Level 4 here, was originally set at 28 days. No malls, or libraries, no flat whites in cafes, no swimming pools. No sports fields illuminated at night, no train trips, no shops except supermarkets. We leave the house only for exercise (everyone walks now) or to get supplies. Only essential goods ordered over the internet. Only essential workers go to an actual place for work. No swimming, no fishing, no gigs, no galleries, no movies. On Day 26 the Prime Minister announced Level 4 was extended for a week. So now next Tuesday we are in level 3, where not much changes except shops can send a wider range of goods to customers, and some sports can be played at private clubs, and kids that can't be looked after at home can go to school. For most of us it will be the same. Our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern is being hailed in the Western world as the great leader of these times. New Zealand acted fast. She resisted moaning by various business sectors about impact on the economy and said lives were important. As of yesterday we had 1461 total cases, 18 deaths, and we've had only between 3 and 6 new cases for the last five days, testing over 6000 a day. New cases are all linked to overseas travel or known cases (bar one under investigation yesterday). Most people who had it have have now recovered and so we have 325 active cases. Ireland has a similar population: over 18,000 cases, over 1000 deaths. Trump continues to be terrifying, his last suggestion was to disinfect people inside their bodies, or to shine virus-killing lights into them. He's now claiming it was a joke. There are 895,766 cases in the US and 50,439 deaths. People are now talking about the US no longer being a superpower. The thing I have been thinking about is how lockdown is not so different for me. My life once so full of people, so occupied with flatmates, and friends, and activist groups and encounters, so driven by the idea of gatherings, of being with, of standing alongside, has emptied. That pre-lockdown I went to work, I very occasionally went to music, I had a monthly volunteer meeting, I once in a while went to something social, but most of the time would lose interest and instead stay at home. I would see wider family. Joe and I would sometimes have friends over to play cards. I organised a last minute party in late summer before lockdown, and it had something I loved in it, of family and friends, the right portions of people who knew each other and those who didn't. We did put up lights and we did sit in our garden. But it was rare. My life has both expanded and narrowed so I return each night to two kids and a partner, and they have taken the place of those other things. They are my greatest loves. But it's different. I'm thinking how, when we move to Level 2, and to Level 1, that it will not be so different. That it will not be a great release from a prison for me. In Level 4 I still spend too much time on the internet, I still chat with friends mostly online, I sometimes engage with new people but I don't know how real all those exchanges are. Do they sustain me in the same way? Do they expose and expand me? The thing about meeting people online, is that you can control everything, you can engage or disengage at will, you can turn away, or talk over. You aren't accountable. There's no etiquette. You're not physically occupying the same air, breaking bread, or painting a banner or planting a garden with them, or being drawn into the magic of clouds and sun and dusk passing over and through a good conversation. The ones that last from afternoon until night. The ones when you remember a friend saying something important and the way the light fell on them, and how their voice went from quiet to urgent. The traffic in the distance. The birds you all hear. I'm wondering if I'd already locked down. What I'd shut off. What part of being human I'd turned from. What I willingly lost and why I lost the hunger for it.
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