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Symbolic picture consisting of: Background and running man: IMAGO / Runway Manhattan | Baker: IMAGO / imagebroker | Table tennis player: IMAGO / United Archives | Crumpled paper: IMAGO / Shotshop |
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In this series we report about the lockdown life: about moods and hopes and about everything that we miss.
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I live on the ground floor and that’s mostly terrible, except when I’m standing at the window on the phone and people can’t help but look curiously into my room. When our eyes meet, they are embarrassed. And then we laugh. In my everyday Corona, I hang around these interactions. Because we have to lose so much social interaction, all encounters during this time seem much more important.
Suddenly at the bakery it feels like the saleswoman is someone who doesn’t just take up a minute of my morning. We tell each other that we will miss each other when she stops working here next month.
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There are two ping pong tables in the square in front of my house. Almost every day I sit on the round bench in the middle of the square and watch the men play. You play in doubles. A woman rarely plays along. She has the same hairstyle as me. My watching is not cheering. I watch the square as if I were a queen looking out over her realm from her palace. This is all that is left of the normal. For 22 years I have experienced things so that I can tell them to Paul, a lumberjack’s shirt for teaching, on a shoddy flat-share couch, to explain to him why I am the coolest person in this room. And now there are Corona and no flat share parties. I’m sitting in the square in front of my house, wondering what to do with so much life when it’s forever pandemic. Sometimes I feel a little ridiculous that I worked so hard when I could have just sat down somewhere and watched people play table tennis for 22 years.
When I sit on the square, I sometimes take a book with me. That’s something, because I always plan to read, but I never do. Before the late night near the square, a man sometimes sells books. He lives in the house next to me and when we meet we usually don’t talk. Today he walks past me and asks what kind of book I am carrying around. I’m saying something about the book that is probably not true. I haven’t read it. I do this because I want to talk or to be polite.
A guy buys two sternis at Späti in the afternoon. I’m jealous of his gait. His steps are neither too small nor too big. I often think that he listens to my roommate and me when we think of a life for the corduroy man we see here every day. I think he heard us when we were talking about the couple with strollers getting something to drink in the café. Both always look unhappy and wear stylish, minimalist outfits in pastel tones and we believe that years ago they mutually agreed to lose their interest in everything. You look boring. I wonder if I look that boring now that I’ve been in a bad mood all the time during the pandemic. I want to know what the guy with the stars thinks of me.
Perhaps I will bridge the lack of social contact during Corona by inflating every little interaction in my head immeasurably. But maybe I’m not even imagining it. Maybe we’re all a little closer because we have more in common now than we did a year ago. Namely a global pandemic, a collective lockdown. We all have nothing better to do than sit here in the square because we have nowhere to be.
Before Corona, our lives were huge and important. Now life has become a wait. Friends, anticipation, being carefree, being in a bad mood for no reason used to determine my everyday life. Today the guy who buys sternis or the men who play table tennis or the pastel couple keep my life together. Maybe I’ll hold something together for her if I change places on the bench in the afternoon with the sun.
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