– 1: Out of Sight, out of mind –
March 15/2020
The day the old world ended was an ironically auspicious day for me, a day of happy occasions and personal achievements. It marked the 9 year anniversary with my life partner, Daffyd; 9 years to the day since we had found each other lost and alone in the limelight of the Queen West club scene. Ever since then, he had been my keeper, my protector, my rock of stability; the first real stability that I had ever had in my life.
I also decided to enact a deeply sacred ceremony; a body modification ritual of self piercing to create a temporary pattern upon my flesh. I wanted to remember and mark the start of this time of change, the start of this change in the course of human history. I wanted to remember that feeling of faith and hope, to hold onto it for all the darker days that were yet to come.
After completing my ritual, I took a walk outside in the courtyard to smoke a joint. Already I could feel it coming down over the city; the silence, the stillness; it was like being surrounded by a dense fog through which sound and light were hidden, dimmed, muddled. The quality of that silence was almost palpable in its depth. As I looked up at the windows of the residential towers above and around me, I had a sudden epiphany; the infamous Shakespeare sonnet; “All the world is a stage, and we are merely players” … I thought about this in a new way, in the context of life in a vastly populated society; We are never alone, here. We are never alone in our life journey, if we choose to live as part of that society, if we choose to live among others, regardless of what the state of that society may be.
From our seat in our local cafe, we watched the newscasts live as the restrictions spread across the world in various degrees, like dominoes falling in line. We anxiously waited until the last moments came, when the global lockdown was officially declared in the western hemisphere. The last remaining holdouts of any non-essential venues had been officially closed down; The night clubs and bars were first, the colourful and energetic events they hosted indefinitely cancelled; The recreational and educational facilities, both public and privately owned were next; Finally the luxury shops begun to shutter, and those few shops providing essential goods and services that had remained open quickly erected plastic barriers in a variety of capacities suitable to manage their crowdspace. The reality of the change had finally overtaken over the urban sprawl.
The once vibrant and ever vital downtown core was now hauntingly dark, quiet, still, and seemingly closed off from itself; the feeling of it was crushing, despite the distance between all other humans that this monumental shift had created. Not in 20 years, I thought, since first leaving my rural country homestead at the age of 17, had I ever felt such stillness, such profound loneliness, and so completely isolated.
When I was just a young child living in those deeply rural lands, there were precious few opportunities available for me to interact with anyone outside of the home. I was not only sheltered by my family, but intentionally isolated by them, and the distance they had placed between me and society had crippled my social adaption as a young adult. When I first arrived in the city on my own, I knew almost nothing of the world, I understood nothing outside of the forests and farmlands which sustained us. I had come out of a world that was almost standing still; a fragment of time lost between the cracks of a world moving on, always moving too fast for me to catch, even though I came out of that world running, and still running all these years later, still trying to catch up with a world that was so far ahead of me.
And now? That world has suddenly come to a grinding halt around me. And however frightening that is, there is also a strange kind of peace to it; perhaps I will finally be able to catch up and gain some ground to it.