A room is a world. In the area of 4.5 straw mats a mythic universe can be contained. The clock is set, and I have all the time in the universe. Time to rethink my life.
For weeks I make negligible progress. Here I am, with too few friends and too little work, in a new school for the first time in six years, and I can’t think to save my life. I keep myself sane by messaging random people, only one of whom (a Leon) messages back. I begin a diary, and end a week later with an empty diary. University in a prison cell is a strange sort of torture, and the sounds of the illegal parties in the distance make it more so. It’s time for more drastic measures.
It’s time for more drastic measures.
It’s time for more.
It’s time.
It’s.
It
I
When I come out of the hole it’s been two months and term is approaching the end and I’ve done next to no work and the emails are piling up. To this day I don’t know what made me stand up after forty eight hours of a delirious netflix binge and certainly more than a week of not showering. Maybe it was hunger, maybe it was desperation. Maybe it was divine intervention. But I stood up, slapped on a mask, and staggered out the door to use my exercise quota for the first time. I remember feeling a strange sort of energy, the kind that comes from knowing that, if you lie down again, you might not ever get up. A ringing certainty that you cannot, must not, go back to sleep, at any cost. The day spools out of my memory like a dream, an unreal collection of events and sequences.
It was 10 a.m. in the morning. The streets were deserted. My feet strode down the lush street by themselves, moved by what felt like alien sympathies. Live feet on live ground in a quiet, silent world—it felt for a moment like I had total control, absolute freedom. Then I got bored and took out my phone.
COVID LOCKDOWNS PROJECTED TO LOWER—
Wait, no, that wasn’t what happened. I saw her first. A girl with curly dark hair, walking on the other side of the street. I didn’t know why I stopped to wave—I must have looked like a wreck. I didn’t know why she stopped and waved back. Maybe it was that same iron certainty that had driven me out of my room in the first place.
She looked about my age, with a set of sleek glasses and a thin black jacket with a small patch of a cartoon seal. The conversation lasted about five minutes, by the end of which we’d agreed to take another walk a few days later. She saved my life, though she probably didn’t know it. We would take three more walks in the next weeks, then the chat would die off and she would fade from my life. But that tiny encounter left me feeling glorious, triumphant, live feet on live ground in a quiet, silent world—it felt for a moment like I had total control, absolute freedom. Then I got bored and took out my phone.
COVID LOCKDOWNS PROJECTED TO LOWER CARBON EMISSIONS WORLDWIDE
Well, I supposed, that was more good news. The thought entered my mind to engage in a lockdown research project, for the benefit of my own sanity if nothing else. It would, I reflected, be a good use of this temporary surge of energy: I had always thrived when given difficut topics to research, whether alone or in school. Then I went home and fell asleep again.
Let thoughts fall, fly, releax, rewind. Step through the stream of time an interloper, and see what gifts memory brings. What begins as a hobby becomes my obsession from lockdown morning to lockdown midnight. Days turn to weeks as my studies lie fallow, but a new and feverish energy keeps me up, reading IPCC reports and Kyoto Protocols and WWF articles and the summaries of the last five COPs. My supervisor, a Ph.D called John Aland, sends me increasingly worried emails. At last, I meet with him over zoom. His face is blurry and indistinct, the screen filled with artifacts and sudden jerks. Across the miles his voice crackles and bleeds unconvincingly, the tinny voice of a hollow man.
“C-Can you hear me?”
“Can you—”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, I can hear—”
“Okay, good. Sorry, yes, let’s begin. I’m rather concerned about your performance—”
“I just want to say sorry about my performance—”
“Can I go—tzz first? Thank… you.”
“Okay.”
“Look, you’re not handing in your—bzt supervision work, and during the supervisions you seem… checked out. If this continues I’ll have to contact your tutor and director of studies—”
“There’s a reason—”
“Look, I’ll let you get on to your reason—czzz, if you let me actually finish my POINT. I want to be patient with my students—drtz but if you keep this up you won’t actually get anything from this course.”
“I’m very sorry, John, but at this point I can’t see any reason to continue with the course when I now understand the state of emergency we’re experiencing with regards to the climate. Surely as part of geography we need to appreciate the urgency of the situations we’re dealing with, right? The course just wants me to argue clever essays and cite properly—Nothing about how to actually solve problems-”
But the college wifi had cut off and I had to send my speech to him via email instead.