Animal Crossing for One.

I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling. The weather is beautiful again. The blossom hangs from the trees under unseasonably blue skies. I can see the sunlight teasing me through the window. Imagine having a balcony. Or a garden. I roll out of bed. I don’t really know what day it is, but there will be a baggy shape to it. Chores to do. Commitments I have promised to people.

It is under the extreme conditions of COVID-19 that I have realised that all of my coping mechanisms are built for one. Suffused with the knowledge that in all of this I am cocooned by my privilege, I judge when to sort through the thoughts, when I need distracting from them, and how to sit with them, how to counterbalance their weight – for me, that means falling into patterns and rhythms. I eat the same breakfast lunch and dinner for a whole week (I can afford to eat). When I do sport I take the same routes and I sink into the rhythm of the pedal stroke or footfall and my thoughts percolate (I can afford to do sport). I let myself sleep as much as possible knowing that the nighttime is when my brain tries to solve insoluble problems (my accommodation is secure).

In a new country (my 1 year Dane-iversary is in 10 day’s time) I don’t have well established roots to tend to. Most of my friends have more established networks if they need support. My family now live a newly unfathomable distance away. Some nights I lay awake until 3am plotting a route to them. On the darker nights, I wonder about wetsuits. I’m a strong swimmer. A good cyclist. I did an Ironman once. I would swim the sea for them. But of course that only works if you have a boat to navigate for you. Could I learn the stars?

I call my mum almost every day. She is alone (though has a garden, and animals for company) and struggling to source food without leaving the house. (She’s 67, with a blood disorder, we don’t want to risk it). When I call she’s typically organising climate activism training or Rock Choir over Zoom, or editing her debut science fiction novel. She shows me the pets when I ask to see them. On one call she says to me: “Don’t worry about a funeral, if it comes to it. Don’t feel bad if you can’t have a funeral for me.”

I read a beautiful essay in the London Review of Books about Simone de Beauvoir, caring for her mother. I think about the phrase ‘a good death’, the meaning of which has grown for me in recent weeks.

When the doctors and the nurses talk about the trauma of it all, that’s where they all arrive: what it is to care for people who must die alone. To die apart from the web of love we spin with our lives. Oh, some spin thin, frail careless strands, but when I think of this for a moment, when my mind flits on and then away as quickly as possible – because nothing counterbalances the horror of it – it is my mother I think of. And I promise you, her bonds are thick and full and stretch all around the world. She has not lived a small life. I see in it also the shape of mine.

A long time ago now I wrote a PhD which contained a fair amount of philosophy on ‘community’. I was interested in ways of thinking about what it is to be together in ways which undo the tired political and capitalist definitions which pin the idea of community’s dusty wings into a notebook. I found Blanchot and Nancy, who spoke about the practice of community as impossible and also found in the attempt at the impossible. They used the example of being by someone’s side as they die, and of the lovers. At the time (over a decade ago) I was more enamoured by the idea of the lovers, never able to be one, and yet turning again and again to one another. These days it is the deathbed I find magnetic. By someone’s side: impossible to travel with them, but together in that you, too, will one day find the same limit with another. The impossible space between us, gesturing to our togetherness.

I have an insufficiently stable router to play Animal Crossing online. (I do not want to be talked through fixing it. I have played with DMZ settings, set up virtual servers, reset both machines, followed every ‘how to’ on port-forwarding. It is still, stubbornly, NAT D). I am reconciled to it.

I never thought of myself as an Animal Crossing kind of person (I’m a flow-of-math turn-based kind of gamer; Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, Loot Rascals). Friends warned me I’d find it too twee (it is, but it owns it in the writing in ways which are sharper and wholler than twee-aesthetic-only works, like Parks & Rec in a way), and anyway, how could I have time for it? I already have sport, and run a games company!

I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling. The weather is beautiful again. The blossom hangs from the trees under unseasonably blue skies. I can see the sunlight teasing me through the window. Imagine having a balcony. Or a garden. I roll out of bed. I don’t really know what day it is, but there will be a baggy shape to it. Chores to do. Commitments I have promised to people.

I cannot visit others via online play. I can only travel to empty islands for resources. Or engage with essential workers Timmy & Tommy, who after selling you what you need, mime their pleasure as they wish you a good day. In a way, I am not sorry. I bought the game only after payday, and am a week or so behind most people. I don’t want to see their wonderful gardens, their large houses, the art they’ve (re)constructed. The great aesthetics they’ve cultivated. The meaning they have made of it. I stare at the night sky and I think I probably don’t know how to use the (R) button properly. I still haven’t seen a shooting star.

In two years I have lived in two cities in two countries; Milan and Copenhagen. Before that London, a place containing more people than the whole of the country I currently live in. I work in a very ‘international’ industry. My bonds are stretched across the world, and it can sometimes make them feel quite thin. I tug at them through video calls, group chats, instagram messages with bike pals or Italians, DMs, riding in Wattopia on Zwift with Tom, watching Picard episode by episode with my Viennese friend Josef. I spoke to my neighbour the other day. Said anytime they needed anything they could put a note under my door. He said they’re fine.

I collect wood, gather eggs, fish, fossils, I finally learned that you shouldn’t smash your rocks entirely and they’re beginning to grow back. I move trees around, and see if I can make another houseplant for my sparsely furnished apartment. I thank Timmy and Tommy for their service. I move on.

I move, I move, I move, I move.

My coping strategies designed for one.