There are so many things that a global health crisis brings to a standstill. The paths of aeroplanes, lighting up the sky above an airport suburb. The hum of restaurants after 5pm. Concerts, plays, stand-up, cabaret, opera. The clinking of glasses. The weird and unwelcome intimacy of hearing your coworker flush a toilet.
We live in strange, uncanny times. Cruise ships have become Flying Dutchmans and hand sanitiser the stuff of ambrosia. Pandemic fictions have become a source of comfort and familiarity. Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera has been lovingly parodied in countless tweets and by SBS Comedy.
But I keep going back to a short story, by Carmen Maria Machado in her book Her Body and Other Parties, called ‘Inventory’. In its simplest terms, the story is a narrator’s list of her lovers loved: boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbours, strangers. From this inventory emerges, bit by bit, the story that has made the list necessary: an epidemic is ravaging the world’s population. There is no vaccine, but as a woman from the narrator’s community tells her as they are lying in bed together, ‘the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact... If people would just stay apart—’.
Machado’s story is from 2017, long before the current pandemic turned our old lives into the stuff of history. What goes unsaid by the narrator is that in times of crisis, the balm of physical contact is both a precious commodity and a source of intimate danger. Over the last few weeks, affection and social proximity have become something approximate to the top tier of the food pyramid: consumption to be restricted; consider what you could do without. If you live alone, if you are able-bodied and have no dependents, much of the reigning health advice is easy to follow — but some things are hard, as well.
Though my phone rings every night, and my dad has gotten WhatsApp for the first time in his life, I find myself missing hugs, and making lists of things that feel obsolete: one-night stands, wakes, the communal pressure of group exercise, the sense of companionship in watching a movie side-by-side, picnic rugs. I buy locally and donate to homeless support services; my friends and I Skype each other while watching the same documentary on Netflix.
Still, my days are dulled by a feeling of what I can best describe as discomfort, a word whose sense becomes more revealing when broken into OED-sized pieces. Dis- implies reversal or negation; com- is a Latin prefix which can mean ‘together with, in combination or union’; and fort is a word meaning strength. In short, the ache I am feeling is that of absence. I did not know, until it vanished, how much mental and spiritual fortitude I derived from the pleasure of physical closeness.
'In the meantime, I tell my friends through the screen that I love them, more often that I used to. I look out for small kindnesses.'
At the very least, I am not alone here. My phone rings every night, from friends who are finishing twelve-hour shifts because they work jobs that are keeping the country together, and from friends who have lost their jobs and now have nothing and no one to wake up for, no need to sleep, and no reason to go out. Many of them have told me they are reaching out through social media to ex-lovers, hungry to know who else is lonely too. The other day I met up with a friend in Princes Park, ostensibly for the purpose of ‘personal exercise’; upon sight of each other, we exchanged a single, illicit hug, not sure if doing so was irresponsible or simply human.
In Machado’s dystopia, the prospects for the community who cannot stay apart are grim. By the story’s end the narrator is truly alone, not just suffering from the discomfort of apartness. In Australia, at least, we are faring better: in April, the Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy revealed that the government’s coronavirus modelling indicated our social distancing measures are flattening the curve, though we may not see an end to them for a long time. And there’s no evidence to suggest that a vaccine is beyond the scope of pharmaceutical firms and health institutions, but it might take a year, or more, for any of us to see it.
In the meantime, I tell my friends through the screen that I love them, more often that I used to. I look out for small kindnesses. I take heart when I see people stepping around each other in the supermarket, or lines of people spaced 1.5 metres apart to keep the local coffee shops afloat. I smile at strangers, more to remind myself what smiling feels like than for any other reason. I keep count of how many days I can go without touch.
I am preparing myself for a year of apartness; a year of labouring to stay connected in unconventional ways; a year of learning to be content with absence for the sake of a healthier future. I looked up the etymology of ‘together’ while writing this. The prefix to- sometimes has a sense of motion to it, as in ‘towards’; gether is from an Old English root word that means fellowship, or union. If apartness feels like deprivation, I tell myself, at least it is a deprivation that I have in common with others. The more we stay apart, the stronger, and more direct, the path to togetherness will be.
Georgia White is a writer, tutor, and PhD student from Melbourne who has written previously for Boshemia Mag, the Oxford Review of Books and Queen Mob's Tea House. She researches nineteenth-century supernatural and Gothic fictions and tweets sporadically at @georgiamonsters.
Main image: Neighbours through their apartment windows (Getty Images/Maria Voronovich)