Quarantine

Christopher Caceres

When I moved to New York, I never thought I’d spend so much time in my apartment. My girlfriend and I rented a 407-square-foot studio, figuring it was a great way to save money. What could go wrong?

Two months later, the first coronavirus case was confirmed in the state. At first, the stay-at-home orders seemed like a vacation, but as the virus spread, those with the means to flee did. The rest of us stayed.

We began feeling trapped in our studio with no end in sight. Life became a perpetual Groundhog Day of body counts and banana bread.

It was in April when we realized we had to change. We needed to figure out a way to live a life that didn’t include sweatpants, arbitrary online purchases, and binge-watching “Schitt’s Creek.” Our only sense of time became the 7 o’clock banging of pots and pans in honor of first responders.

We began doing things we missed about our pre-COVID lives in the city. Some nights our apartment would transform into a four-star Italian restaurant with white tablecloths and fancy wine, others it would become Broadway (but with better seats) with homemade playbills. One night we hung a few neon lights, played ’80s music and had a dance party in our living room — pretty sure our neighbors weren’t too happy about that one. We started seeing our apartment as our oasis rather than our prison. We stopped waiting for permission to live our lives.

I thought facing the pandemic inside a 407-square-foot apartment was going to be its own brand of 2020 horribleness, and at times it was, but we realized people have the capacity to adapt — to turn terribleness into less terribleness. I wonder if I’ll miss my time playing pretend in my quarantine studio.

Christopher Caceres has graduated from CCSU and is working in New York City.