everyone is bad in the coronacene: reflections from a locked down cape town.

Content Warning: Suicidal thoughts I wake up at 8:55 a.m. everyday but go back to sleep until 9:21. I know with a bizarre certainty that I will wake up at 8:55 every day. Time moves differently, has an elasticity that means that when I wake up on day 125 (?) of lockdown, it feels like the beginning to a journal entry I wrote three months ago. It feels that way because it is. I’m allowed to lie in bed for seven minutes, contemplating the nothingness before I must get up and face last night’s dishes. Every morning. ​ Every morning there is Vitathion, a sachet of immune-boosting vitamins. I can’t decide if I think it’s working yet or not, but it’s not not working because I haven’t got the virus yet, so I drink it. I mix it in with a glass of water and stare at the swirling pink concoction. I wonder if that is the most beautiful thing I will see today. I have this same exact thought everyday at 9:45. ​ I wonder if I should clean my windows, and then wonder how I would go about doing that. I wonder if it makes a difference because no one will see them anyways, and I wonder if only caring about having dirty windows when others will see them makes me a disgusting person. I don’t think I care. I switch on my phone, and the day begins. ​

It is all-consuming, this new version of being online in the pandemic, if it’s possible to get more all-consuming than it was before. Confined to our dirty homes, we have taken to the virtual space, shouting and performing, desperate for some kind of perverse recognition. I am confronted by an Instagram graphic that screams, “MUSLIMS ARE BEING SKINNED ALIVE,” followed by a Masterclass advert of Thomas Keller skinning salmon. It is an onslaught, this new social media, and the algorithm works tirelessly to create a carnival of horrors, through which I swipe listlessly. I wonder, for a few agonizing days, if there is violence in the swipe, in the turning away, the refusal to bear witness. But there is only so much we can bear, I reassure myself. I feel better. ​ I consume with a pathological determination that borders on unhinged. I read, White Fragility, and hate it, but not because of my own white fragility, I don’t think. I hope. I watch movies every day and it is only after six months that I realise this is what escapism looks like. But it doesn’t matter. I started the lockdown with, Mona Lisa’s Smile, and have worked my way through 126 films to, The Young Girls of Rochefort. I proudly tell my sister I am watching French films. She tells me to stop being a snob. ​ I read about how biracial rapper Doja Cat is exposed for having shown her feet to an online community of white supremacists, and people on Twitter are saying that if she had a black mother and a white father instead of a white mother and a black father, this would never have happened. I do not know why or even what that means only that it seems important. A lot seems important. A friend keeps telling me, “I don’t think we will realise how important this all is until it has been over for a very long time. We’re too close still. We’re in it.” That sounds profound, so I nod, but secretly I think she’s just saying that to avoid looking directly at anything now, in this moment. I especially don’t know what it has to do with Doja Cat. ​ The word “webinar” begins to trigger a mild headache behind my left eyebrow. It is everywhere promising wellness, reflection, skills. Connection. “Webinar” is a stupid term and I hate it. Some words do not need the Modernity Treatment. ​ I have not been able to journal directly about anything for six months. I have nothing to say. I am briefly jealous of Anne Frank, but then overcome with guilt because she was confined to an attic, and then died, while the biggest hurdle I must overcome is sweeping my fabulous Observatory apartment. Then, buoyed by self-importance, I remind myself it’s okay to be resentful of Anne Frank. Whatever gets us through the pandemic. ​ I begin to hate all of my friends and the near-constant rotation of video calls. Why do I have so many friends? I do not remember so many friends before lockdown, but they come one by one, haunting me, relentlessly demanding to know what series I’ve been watching to get through the days. One day, on a video call with a theatre friend who seriously wants to study the art of clowning, I halt mid-sentence and stay very still, hoping she’ll think I have frozen and have a bad connection. I forget that my ceiling fan is still on, spinning round and round above my still head. It does not go over well. ​ When my mother calls to check in she is selfish about it. She asks me two questions — what’s for dinner and how’s the weather — and then launches into her own opera of disillusionment. Three times a week I am held captive by the dogs’ latest escapades, my younger sister’s mood swings and my mom’s own anxious ramblings. These phone calls bring me no comfort. I have nothing to say to my mother, who is, at times, paralyzed with fear. I cannot help her, my mouth cannot make the words to say that it will be okay. It won’t work, anyways. I’ve tried to tell her already and every time I think she feels better, she finds something new to complain about — more laundry, more people without masks, more withdrawal symptoms because her nightly vase of red wine routine has been disturbed. I grow tired, annoyed. I snap. Twice, I lie and say I am expecting a delivery, that I have to go. I feel guilty, and resolve to try harder. She calls two days later and it’s worse. ​ I consider killing myself, more than once. Not out of depression or a desire to escape any kind of overwhelming terror. Out of sheer boredom. Suicide and COVID denialism seem to be the only way out, and I want to escape with the least amount of collateral damage. I have thought about this. ​ On a particularly bad day with my anxiety-riddled roommate, I lie and say that we need toilet paper. I wait until she is in the middle of her work for the day and then tell her, reassuring her that I will go out and get some, not to worry about it. I leave, walk two streets down, find a tree and sit under it for thirty minutes. It is bliss. When it is over, I walk quickly to the Clicks down the road, buy a nine-pack and make my way back to my apartment. When I get back, she asks why it took so long and I say there was a long line, they had to limit the amount of people in the store. She asks if I’m sure I didn’t touch anyone or anything, does my throat feel tight, am I lightheaded, how’s my sense of taste? Feeling cruel, I tell her I’m a bit dizzy and want to go lie down. Frantic, she sanitises and heads straight for the MedLemon. My retreat is not even worth it. ​ All over the Internet, I am attacked by messages of positivity, solidarity, community. “We must come together, fight this thing as one!” the world seems to maniacally chant. Everywhere, I am encouraged by acts of kindness, foundations that start up to help the worst affected, friends taking up the mantel of social justice, making change. And even as I am inspired, I sink further and further into myself. I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to comfort or be comforted. I am constantly annoyed, having developed a temper that can only be a result from six months of isolation. I am more impatient, quick to anger and so sarcastic that I don’t even know how I feel anymore. Every time I enter a grocery store, I must resist the temptation to bark at the elderly woman behind me to keep her distance. Every time my roommate asks me if I’ve noticed her coughing more, the urge to snap back is almost insurmountable. I gossip in a way I haven’t done in years, relishing in nastiness. I am bitter, harsh and cruel. I am surviving a pandemic. ​ Years from now, when my friend finally talks about how important this all was, I will be sure to tell her this. That, at the worst of times, when the crucible supposedly showed the best of humanity, with frontline workers and food aid volunteers stepping up to be the shining examples of what community looks like, there were those of us who could not keep up. There were those of us, exhausted at the prospect of living through our first global disaster, that gave up on community, grew exasperated at the futility of our comforting words and shrugged off offers of support. She will pretend she does not know what I am talking about for a while, but after a couple of mojitos, she’ll come clean, sheepishly recounting her own quarantine war stories. And it is this shared knowledge, not the unhinged performances of positivity, that will comfort us; the knowledge that we showed the worst sides of ourselves in the pandemic.