Restlessness and screens
I have two cats and our bond narrows more and more every day; we belong to the same confinement now. One of them, always in a permanent gloomy mood, has turned into a purring machine, chasing after us in search of affection. They like routine, I don’t. But it comes as a natural need in a continuous string of amended days — when nothing around me changes, only what happens on screens. These weird luminous windows where my friends, my work, my hobbies, my family, and everything else live and happen.
Sometimes I feel sick of screens; their quiescent presence following me along the day, everywhere, even in the bathroom (the last source of privacy), forces me to face my hostage position in this relationship as never before. But why here? Why now? I thought I would read tons of books in the quarantine, but here I am, 2 books read, 46 days in quarantine. I have read books continuously since I learnt how to read and, only today, I wonder how much they served me as a tool of isolation. Or meditations on the self. Not only myself, but other selves. And to be able to dive into it, we must get rid of ourselves. Reading is not a passive activity, it requires allowing someone else’s thoughts into your own mind, running (and overwriting) into your feelings. If not, why do some people cry while reading books? Reading is our ability to learn by other experiences. It is an exercise of abandonment of the self. It requires some inner peace. But how can I put myself into someone else’s shoes when I am so fed up with my own presence? The restlessness has become a constant in my state of mind. Curiously the unrest makes room for the screens. They fit well in the unbearable suspension of physical realities. I feel like I am merging into the windows. The cat’s purring brings back a sense of skin.
The lack of worries about banal things, like getting dressed to go to work, has stripped off a thick layer that covered myself from the world. As the days go by, it remains less and less from the shell, and more and more of me is left to be contemplated. Like a snake changing the skin, a new layer must sprout out of the pores, but it seems that the old skin has ripped too soon. I am more than naked, I am skinless.
My apartment is filled with everything I love. Books, musical instruments, comic books, board games, my cats, my partner, dictionaries, plants, culinary supplies, flour, yeast, the list goes on. I am not only tired with my loneliness for being alive in the year of 2020, I am constantly looking at the things that are a pure representation of myself. And the most dangerous things are also present: paper and pen.
So, I am simply seizing the chance of being skinless and too fed up with myself. I will expose things that were saved only to my own personal journal. On screens, of course. In the most unfashionable way of the XXI century: starting a blog about experiencing a pandemic. Very original, I know.
‘There are four great motives for writing […] They exist in different degrees in every writer […] 1. Sheer egoism […] 2. Aesthetic enthusiasm […] 3. Historical impulse […] 4. Political purpose’
(George Orwell, ‘Why I write)
I wonder where I have been this whole time before. It is laughable to talk about loneliness when I watch my friends with kids in complete despair. When some of them lose their jobs. Or when I talk to the ones who live alone. My look is a privileged look. But I am not deaf to other experiences beyond my own, these experiences that come to me through screens. I feel them.
My loneliness is killing me
I must confess I still believe
When I’m not with you I lose my mind
Give me a sign(Britney Spears, ‘Baby one more time’)
I knock on the door of enclosed homes when I unlock my phone. Most of them are already wide open, waiting for me to look at. Not only literal homes, but people’s skinless self. It is the feeling of being lonely in a crowded room, when the room fits on your hand and you can’t put it down. It is being lonely together, away but close. And which masks they choose to present themselves on my screen. Which layers are sprouting from their pores.
Welcome. I am building a skin here.
