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.
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