April 13, 2020

Lockdown Day 7

Another hideous scream jolts me out of bed. This morning, the voice belongs to a person several floors above us. He hollers — panicky and fearful — over and over again.

Worried neighbors begin emerge from their hiding places to gather below us.

“Hey mister, are you alright? Please tell us if you’re okay. We are concerned about you!” a lady below me shouts.

No reply, only a deafening silence. But her words touch me and gives me hope. Maybe it’s just PMS but I tear up.

We’re a week into the circuit breaker. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens certainly knew what he was talking about.

A record number of people — almost 400 — test positive today and a bulk of it comes from a large pool of migrant workers in Singapore who are here without their families. They have been sent to live aboard a floating ship to wait out their quarantine.

Our day passes by uneventfully. The kids do their homework, I yell, we have lunch, the husband yells. Then I get a text from mom saying she wants to start a blog. I secretly wonder if she needs an audience for her expert advice and opinions on the coronavirus, but she claims she wants to showcase her Masterchef skills.

I wish she was so enthusiastic about cooking when I was younger.

I am also mildly amused whenever Ari goes to the balcony for his daily chats with a boy called Johann who lives downstairs. A usual conversation goes like this:

“Currrrry! Currrrrrry!”

“Yes, Wuhan! What do you want Wuhan virus?”

“Why isn’t your brother wearing any clothes?!!!!”

“Because we were born naked!!!” (Of course I told him to say this. Prudes — even 4-year-old ones — annoy me).

It’s time for our weekly grocery run, and we end up in a supermarket eight kilometers away because the shelves in our neighborhood NTUC is cleared out. We don masks, because it’s illegal now not to do so, and choke in our own spit.

Still, we manage to buy the stuff we need, and I go home to an evening of cheese, jam, crackers and TV with the husband, while the kids lay asleep in bed. Safe and sound. Healthy.

We are the lucky ones.