Quarantine diaries: day 15

 I'm out! Look it was a palaver (not the officials' fault - they were amazing). The parents drove into the city to pick me up, we figured a sunny Sunday afternoon would be a stress-free time. Obviously, the faithful car of 13 years decided to just cut engine around the corner from the hotel. Bit of an inglorious end to the stay, hanging around waiting for the auto services by a park. But Sydney weather is treating me ridiculously well (too well - mum said she didn't want to do laundry today because it was "too hot" which is an alien concept to someone who has been struggling for outdoor drying sun in the UK for the last seven years. But alls well that ends well and the next chapter is truly in motion, for better or worse. 

Quarantine diaries: day 13

 So I spent all day yesterday in bed. Bought myself yumcha and basically lay around all day feeling pretty sorry for myself. Not quite sure what happened but my whole body - chest down - went on strike. I was rolling around on the floor trying to stretch my hip out, and then lying in bed on one side then the other, trying to make my obliques LET GO. My calves wouldn't even let me crouch down to pick some papers up. I mean, nothing was going to kill me, and nothing like covid-symptom muscle ache. This was no deep immune response. It was just my body saying no to PE. If the fitness was begun primarily in order to facilitate better mental health (all that endorphin, blood pressure, hormone stuff), then I guess the body decided it needed to remind me that other people live here too and should get a say. This morning I've woken up with a bit of a niggle in my right hip but otherwise feeling much more human and capable of basic human movement, so I guess a day in bed is all the doctor ordered? Either that or all the dumplings.

The nurses and police are supposed to come by at some point today to give me the all clear to leave. They keep mentioning a "certificate" and I am super (but not realistically) excited that it will be an actual piece of paper with like, some gold embossed stamp on it. I will frame that thing if so. I understand the validity will last only until I leave the foyer tomorrow morning, but considering there isn't actually any community transmission of the virus here at the moment, I think I should be safe? It's going to be strange getting onto public transport again, and heading inside crowded shopping malls. But intellectually I know this is orders of magnitude safer than any kind of similar situation back at home in the UK.

Home. I'm into that foggy liminal space of not knowing what I am calling "home". It'll be different with different people. And if you buy into that idea that home is where your people are, I'm still torn because my heart is far off across the seas. I've left it there very purposefully, but with no specific plan to get it back. I wonder if the thread will snap at some point without me actively cutting it. That will hurt, I think. But I watched the Freeman documentary last night and I recall my first sojourn out into the English countryside and really getting a ghostlike insight into the idea of belonging to a country. My mind dreams in ochre and yellow and eucalypt colours. Part of my being belongs to this place, and in that sense I am glad to be back to this island home. 

Quarantine diaries: day 12

 I am glad I didn't start this off with a countdown. I mean, I kept a list of the days and numbers to tick off (like in prison, as my dad pointed out, although it should have been scratched into a wall rather than written out on hotel paper), but it was a list TO 14, not downwards. A count up, rather than down, to steal a phrase that was intended to lessen exam anxiety for kids. But now it's so very close to the end, and I am making necessary plans for how I am leaving and what I need to do afterwards, that countdown feeling is inching its way into my brain. Simultaneously excited and also apprehensive, I know that I should be busying myself with logistical details, but there is still so much actual time and I am finding it harder and harder to convince myself not to order massive banquets to the hotel room (yolo, right?) and lay around glorying in this enforced 5-star hotel stay. 

It is possible I have slightly overdone the fitness workouts. My joints are mildly unhappy with me, and it doesn't help, I suppose, that they don't have the regular but incremental lubrication of incidental walking around to get to things. Its absolute stillness (how much movement does needlework take?) and then extreme arms-waving, body-rolling, high-kicking, squat-repping, high-intensity action for an hour and a half. I may be getting too old for this...

The excitement of planning things and treating myself to chimney cake last night has given way to the realisation this morning that there are still two, maybe three, more days of this soft-humming existence. I miss the sound of birdcall (and Aussie bird call in particular - none of that super sweet and vaguely polite British stuff), and the door slamming and engine revving of the suburbs. It's not silent here, and I can't decide if that would be better or worse. There is a neverending mechanical hum of machinery emanating from the city, the whoosh of occasional planes or trucks, and the sounds of the hotel - extractor fans, aircon, vacuums. But it all sounds distant and unrelated to me. There's nothing I can do to affect any of those noises. I can't even get away from them. Uh-oh, is this my lady in the wallpaper moment?

Quarantine diaries: day 11

 The end is so near I can smell it. Which is obviously a good sign, symptoms-wise. I think I may suffer some attachment issues when I get out - flashes in my most anxious moments (and there will definitely be some of those considering all the wedding duties I have apparently just been assigned) and longing for the safety and numbness I felt whilst inside. I wonder if there is some kind of badge all of us quarantine-completers. There should be one. Like a little lapel pin we can flash each other when we meet at cafes and stand much further away from each other than all the other Sydneysiders. 

But I am so looking forward to sitting on grass again and wandering around trees and moving water and feeling a breeze. As an exercise in encouraging gratitude, this experience has definitely worked on me. Never will I take that stuff for granted ever again, but I've just planned out my 4 days of freedom before the festival of sister's wedding commences and I am going to have to scrape for my nature time in amongst all the other normal-life chores. It'll be worth it though. To be back and safe and participating and with family is a bigger deal than past me would have ever been able to recognise. So that's a change. 

Quarantine diaries: day 10

 Realised how dependent my body is becoming on this routine I have set up. Dinner was over an hour late - I say "late", but the paperwork at the start did say that all meals would be delivered to our rooms within a 2 hour window each time, it's just that they have been so punctual that I had gotten used to eating at 1815 on the dot. My stomach was growling, I was getting hangry, snapping at people over the chat and generally feeling displeased and even more frustrated because there was nothing I could do about it. I had a few leftover jelly beans and plenty of tea, but they weren't ever going to hit the spot. And I started looking around on deliveroo, just to see what my options were, but none of them were going to get here imminently, and then I could foresee the daft nuisance of any deliveroo I ordered coming exactly at the same time as the provided hotel food and me feeling like a piggish twit having to eat it all at once. So I sat and stewed and then nachos and chilli arrived, with a can of what I am deciding to interpret as "apology pepsi" (because it is the first fizzy pop I have had since coming in here). Which I proceeded to skull and immediately regretted it. All those bubbles. All that sugar. But alls well that ends well and all ends well if I don't get a hanger-inspired takeaway. 

Today is day 10. Second swab day! Which means I get to see some actual humans for the first time in a long time. The mental health calls everyday are helping to remind me about how to talk to strangers, which is an important skill I was at risk of losing, and I did once see a man walk briefly through an office in one of the tower blocks opposite me (I don't usually because of a combination of lack of direct sunlight and quite darkly tinted windows all around me, but this once I managed it because it was just getting dark and he had his light on and I didn't yet). I think I am facing a lot of back offices, because I've only seen someone inside any of them that one time, and then there was the time a man came out to have smoke on the creepily empty balconies off another block. 

Hopefully this swab is also negative, I don't get any calls until day 13, and then I get the all-clear and go-ahead to arrange to be picked up by actual family. I don't know if I'm allowed to hug them still. I mean we will be living together and I have been given an all clear after two tests, and there aren't any community cases in Sydney, so it's not like they will have it (and they're OLD, so unlikely to be asymptomatic carriers, one hopes). But the rules are so against any kind of common sense that I don't want to make any assumptions. Elbow bumps for the fam it is. 

Quarantine diaries: day 9

 I think I'm running out of things to day. Last night as I was staring up at the ceiling I think I was running out of things to think. Which is ridiculous because there is so much that I'm going to need to rush to do when I get out of here that it would be in my own interest to figure out the most efficient way of ticking all those boxes, which requires thinking time now. But it's all a bit like travelling through molasses at the moment. There is a sweetness, and a bitter-sweetness to this time, its luxury, its emptiness, its safety. But there is a goal I need to get to, and things I want to do, and this time is slowing me down and holding me back. But it's getting closer to the end with every passing moment, so at least I can see it coming. 

Excellent meal for dinner yesterday - I am inspired to try it when I get out of here. It'll be a nostalgia eat for me ever after. Salmon fillet (I did think it could be trout for a minute) with creme fraiche, mustard, dill and caper sauce. And kipfler potatoes, which I am a big big fan of. How on earth will I cope with regular mum-meals when I have gotten used to lovely little cakes at the end of each meal? I suppose I'll be the one making them once my shipping container arrives with all the baking supplies. 

It will be so strange to go back to having deadlines and cutoffs to getting things done. Here, if I don't wipe down the tables immediately, it's not a big deal at all. Not even a tiny deal. If I don't get up by 7am (which is the arbitrary time I've set for myself), no one will even notice. There won't be any consequences at all - no washing to have hung, no dishes to have done, nowhere to have been late to, no one to get annoyed at my missing something. I fear it will chafe when all that comes back into force. But at least I have a baptism of fire ready and waiting for me. 3 days after I get out it is time to head inland and do ALL the sister wedding things, and I'll be scrapping for time to do daily yoga, let alone sitting and staring at a wall time. All the boxes I had dismantled in my mind, what with the no real teaching/work, no socialising, and the lovely emotionally open home situation in the last 6 months, will need to get built up and organised again pronto just so I can cope without bursting into tears every 10 minutes. But I will cope. Because that's what I do. 

Quarantine diaries: day 8

 Aaaaaand we're into the second half of this "experience". I took a couple deep breaths when I realised that halfway was a wonderful milestone, but that it also meant I had to do all of the last week again. It's not been difficult, it has just required mental discipline. I suppose, I could have just veg-ed out for the whole time, but I feel like it could have made the time seem much longer, and I would have been in atrocious physical condition by the end. As it is, I'm hopeful I have lost that unnecessary 5 kilos or so, and my flexibility, while it hasn't got noticeably better, has definitely not got worse. My left calf-hammy-achilles is still not right, but that will be a task to resolve once I can test it out on a walk further than one end of my hotel room to the other. 

I've got to rearrange my morning ritual. Sitting up in bed and reading the news might be a good way to slowly come to the reality of being alive in the world, but the state of the news at the moment means it is also making me cranky, depressed and frustrated. Between the virus and the second wave spikes around the world, the state of the (non-)leadership of the government affecting my mates back in the UK, and the ongoing and escalating nonsense sounds coming out of the US, returning the world does not fill me with excitement or glee. There must be cases of people really struggling to readjust after having lived for such a while in such a bubble in quarantine. 

Very oddly, I am finding the positive affirmations and self-care slogans being recommended on my instagram account (I blame liking the yogawithadriene account) being quite helpful. The old cynic in me sees the calming fonts and background colours and reflexively wants to scoff, but in my old age (ha!) I am seeing the wisdom in some of these sayings and fripperies. Perhaps it is emotional growth, or maybe a recognition that this stuff takes effort and matters, but I read, consider and integrate now, which I'm sure my 15 year old self would be up in arms about.