Searching for home; turns out it’s all around us
Writers shed light on the times we’re in. So in the time of COVID-19, the Star wanted to hear what some of the best in Canada had to say. We present the next in a series of essays that share ideas, emotions, ways to cope — and bring us together.
I am staying at my boyfriend’s apartment during the pandemic. We use the back fire escape to get in and out of the house, while the other tenants in the building use the front staircase to avoid cross contaminating our households. It’s so lovely to have someone to be quarantined with, as there are many people who are by themselves. But there is something quite maddening about being in isolation with one person. I haven’t lived with a man since I was in my early twenties, so this was an unexpected turn of events I wasn’t quite emotionally prepared for. It’s like being in a huit close existential drama. Everything the other person says or does ends up being put under a microscope so you end up dissecting and over-analysing it. As a result of this, once a week we end up having a fight and breaking up for the afternoon.
One day I got furious at my boyfriend because his ex-girlfriend posted an emoji on his Instagram page and I decided to overreact big time.
I picked up my suitcase in one hand, and tucked both my dogs under my arms. To storm out, I had to climb down one flight of the fire escape, cross over a rooftop, and then go down another narrow flight of cast iron steps. The dogs on the other balconies barked as us and we went down and the neighbours looked at me quizzically through the window.
My boyfriend called down after me, “You are being obnoxious! I don’t even talk to her.”
“I can’t stay!” I hollered back. “You drive me up the wall. I’m not coming back!”
“But why are you taking the dogs? I’ll be lonely,” he yelled down. “If you go, I will never speak to you again!”
I head off, thinking, “Once I was cool, and now I am acting like a character in a Tennessee Williams’ play, yelling up at balconies.”
I’m in the process of getting evicted, so I didn’t really want to go to my apartment, because it doesn’t feel homelike anymore. I rent a classroom in an abandoned elementary school and use it as a studio, so I went there.
Nobody was in the other classrooms as they had all gone into quarantine. Ordinarily there is a piano teacher giving classes to children. The children run by and bang on my door to make the dogs bark. Ordinarily there is an illustrator next door who likes to pop his head in and say hello. Ordinarily the whole building shakes because they are dynamiting a new subway a few blocks away. But it was eerily quiet then.
And then the strange loneliness of the world set in. I couldn’t go sit at a jam packed café with a table the size of an x-large pizza and read a book. Or go to the crowded flea market and look at lamps shaped like mermaids. Or go to a ballet show and watch a halo of sweat beads surround a spinning dancer’s head. Sometimes when I am lonely, I go to the drugstore and have the girls at the makeup counter put different shades of lipstick on me. That would be illegal now.
I wanted to do something that involved getting someone else’s germs on me.
I started missing my boyfriend. I considered I may have been unreasonable. After all, everyone my age has ex-partners. I briefly considered finding a priest who had recently given up their orders, someone like the Hot Priest in “Fleabag.” But my boyfriend is so sweet and cute and plays piano and laughs at every one of my jokes. How could I ever meet anyone who is capable of driving me crazy like he is? Then I realized that if he got sick, then I would very much like to get sick too. In this time we really examine whose germs we want to mix ours with. I packed up my dogs and headed back.
The next day my boyfriend woke me up at noon, telling me we had to get out of the apartment: “My piano tuner is coming and he insists we leave the house. Because he doesn’t want to get sick.”
“Do I have to wear pants?” I asked. “No, of course not.” I was wearing a pair of tights. I threw on a blue sweater the chihuahua had been sleeping on and was covered in dog hair. I tied on my running shoes and out we went. It was a sunny day. We knew a café ten blocks away that was serving coffee through a little window, so we headed there. The man handed my boyfriend two paper cups of espresso and announced it was free coffee day.
“It’s like we are in Italy,” my boyfriend said, looking around the neighbourhood. There was a depanneur with a sign in magic marker advertising they were selling white wine and beer. The houses around us were tiny and made of red brick and stucco. There was an ice machine covered in stickers advertising French drag queens. It could not look more like a corner in Quebec.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s like we are in Italy!”
Since the piano tuner was still at his place, and we couldn’t go back, we decided to go looking for places for me to live. We wandered up and down the streets. There was a historic yellow farmhouse I said I could raise chickens in. My boyfriend pointed out an abandoned store front he said I could put mannequins in and American tourists would travel out of their way to see. There was an industrial building with no windows we decided I could turn into an artist’s colony. I would invite and throw out artists at will. We didn’t consider any ordinary looking residence. The more unusual the abode, the more entertaining the prospect of me living in it was.
I want to stay in the same area because the pandemic has put into relief how important the casual relationships in the neighbourhood I have are. I miss the flower vendor who lectures me on love when I buy roses. I miss the woman who works at the corner store and is always weeping quietly when I buy milk. I miss the young man at the bookstore who always recommends me the most obscure, unreadable books. I miss the postman who speaks in odd non-sequiturs and I think is in love with me, although he is probably no such thing.
The argument some officials give us for not wearing face masks is that they can’t protect us, they only protect other people from us. If we all acted in a manner in which we valued the health and well-being of the strangers around us more than ourselves, we would live in a much safer place. Maybe this is a disease we can only cure if we start thinking of everyone around us like a family and every door we pass as one that leads to home.