The Start of every apocalyptic movie sounds like this.
If I was to tell you at the beginning of 2020, as multiple sparkling colours pierced the cold quiet night of Kabale, that sometime in March, a pandemic would take over the world, travelling with its hosts, country by country, shutting down almost all operations, economic and social, putting air travel to a screeching halt and effectively sending the entire world on holiday, you would not believe me.
That governments would race to manage and decrease potentially catastrophic numbers of patients with a respiratory illness that could be caught just by the level of proximity, having the ability to do serious damage to some lungs while barely infecting others with the old common flu and that there would be as yet no known cure.
Two weeks before, I had come home during my work lunch break. I was showing my cousin what she could do to keep busy when baby went to sleep.
“So when he sleeps,… come in here. I have books. What books do you like? “
“Any.”
“Okay, so just check in here, I have …this one is political. This one is about race. I mean its good but it’s too much. But there this one. A novel.” I looked up.
And she just smiled at me, the rosy smile of a 17 year old in S.6 vacation. Completely young, naive and ultimately more interested in a romance novel than in the Biafran war or Racism in the American South.
As I stood between the yellow walls of the room, it dawned on me just how little time we actually spent in this house. Nothing but boxed up books in here. We came in at night, with weak but committed smiles and asked each other how life had been that day.
The first days after WE were ALL indoors, he woke up speaking about the end. We were in the last days.
“And where did you hear that?”
“Just know, it is.”
And I walked away, angry. Sometimes I caught myself as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, wondering why it had all gone quiet. The rapture, I thought. But when I looked for him, I found him by the kitchen sink. So we were still here.
“You have to get into a routine. Wake up early. Work out. You can’t just sleep, “I said.
You can’t just be distant.
“And if you keep talking about end times, especially at night. You are going to get me depressed.”
“I didn’t know he would talk about that. He was just singing and praying …”
“It was 9:00 p.m!”
If you ask the woman who lives downstairs how long ‘quarantine’ was, she will have a different answer. She’s from Central Africa (but I play more dombolo than she does). She speaks French in a deep coarse voice, a little too loud and in a monotone as if it were an African language . She has five sons and they are usually enough to distract her from her husband’s long absences. It took her two months, and then she began to sing. It was Stuck on You by Lionel Richie that she sang some evening, playing it over and over again. It was difficult not to hear the longing in her voice.
Eventually she became angry. Sometimes when we had just put baby to sleep, she held a bonfire near his window, roasted meat and sang as loudly as she could in her worst voice. During day, I never saw her or heard her. The enthusiasm she had at first, taking videos (for her husband, I suppose) while jogging waned. Eventually, as the borders remained closed, she began to pray. One night at 3:00 a.m she was casting out demons through her bedroom window which is directly beneath ours. I could not tell whether she was drunk or filled with the Holy Spirit but I suspected that she could not sleep and did not want me to sleep either.
As for me, I had altered the thread of confusion. I had wanted more time with my family. I wanted to know what it felt like to live in the home we had curated. And every day I woke up, there was nowhere else to go, no where else that either of us had to be. Peace came in tidbits and finally engulfed me.
And then the world began to open up again.
1st June 2020. Appropriately. The first day of the month, on the first day of the week that I went back to work. I received a message.
Hello.
Hi.
Wow. We are back to communicating through the phone.
I felt shaky.
That first Friday, we went to the Cinema. It was empty. It was one of those shooting movies he likes. And I closed my eyes and wondered, when does a boy begin to love the gun shooting nerve bursting narrative and how things had changed since our post teenage days. Here we were, all alone, and he was holding just my hand.
On my phone, I wrote ‘Single-handedly Reviving The Movie Industry.” I tried to take a picture of the empty chairs. He asked me what I was doing and I showed him my phone. He laughed. I deleted the status and switched off my phone. The next week, the empty cinema was closed in order to adhere to COVID guidelines.
The next week on Tuesday, I had held paper money for the first time in months. And the next day, I stared at the shiny silver coins I had received as balance. I wanted to write the dates somewhere but the world had changed. It was a fast track world again, I got lost for hours, got stuck in jam, reached home tired. Too tired to write dates about the first time I used money again. Tired enough to get annoyed when baby wanted to extend his play time instead of sleep.
Sometimes I come back home and ‘baby’ looks at me with a deep sad look in his beautiful dark eyes and says ,
BAD!
I think he means, I’m bad for leaving him alone, for coming home too tired to play.
Memories of what ‘quarantine’ felt like are fast fading. It feels like it was a parallel universe. But I remember, lying down on the carpet, spinning, not just from gulping a glass of wine. That night, the 21 days had passed and the glaring light of the television flickered as we waited on the President to announce what would happen next.
PurplePretoria 