Living On COVID Time

by Lucia Chappelle

You would think that after two years in the pandemic straight-jacket, when low-wage workers are saying, “fuck this lousy job,” and middle-class workers are redefining themselves – a polite way of saying, “fuck this lousy job” – and quitting in record numbers, you’d think I’d take the hint instead of just reporting on the phenomenon. The whole world has enough to worry about without being on my back, too. So why do I let myself be a pinball in my own life, bouncing, or being bounced around by little paddles of what everybody else wants me to do? Isn’t quarantine enough to show me the way to extract myself from other people’s plans and follow my own plans?

Quarantine time should have wound a different clock, set up a different calendar. In quarantine time I should have seen the opportunity to make my world my days, my sundial (or whatever device I use that’s never quite in sync with satellite time) all my own, revolving around me.

Maybe Omicron time is a second chance, going into a third year of COVID (three’s the charm?), to actually build a day (or some revolving expanse of time) around my needs. No rushing meals for deadlines – meals come first. No cramming in one more task instead of doing some yoga – yoga comes first. Eating and sleeping and yoga: making those the main events instead of the sideshow.

In this 2022, the third year of the pandemic, history will say that some people went mad, many people died, some people found faith, many people needed to grieve, but the catastrophe gave them no time for their grief. Some people dwelt in anger. And some people created lives that were centered on the things they always wanted. They survived.

We survived.

©2022 Lucia Chappelle