Quarantine

And while people stay locked in their houses and start singing, cheering, or drawing rainbows and words like “it’s gonna be ok”, I shake my head and think that “it’s not gonna be ok at all”. Not better than now, not this way. Despite the climate of fear and suspicious, outside the houses, without us, there are things which are getting better indeed. Things we might have considered before, and which only a quarantine is forcing us to assess now. What is going to be fine when we’ll get out of here? Didn’t the lives we led until yesterday have this kind of situation as a consequence?

Now we are closed, more isolated than ever. How long will it last? How long will we take care of our children with the rainbows? How long will we stay at home and keep manifesting “I stay home, stay the f*** home”? One by one, the bars are all closing, you just have your kitchen to get some coffee or beer. Someone goes shopping as never done in a life, hoping there are no roadpoints around. Someone else takes turns getting the dog out — the quadruped is beat, no longer knows what to piss…

Blaise Pascal said “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Who knows if, when the quarantine is over, we’ll have learned to be by ourselves for a while, and we’ll try to face just one of those problems. Or maybe we will find ourselves armed with axes, totally at the mercy of a cabin fever.