March 31, 2022

Loopy

The past two years have, in some many ways, had me feeling as though I were caught in a loop, and such feelings were really what drove me down in December. I remember feeling devastated by posters around my neighbourhood—a local church had organized a Christmas Eve carol sing, and now all the posters had stickers pasted over them that said, “Cancelled Due to Covid.” A friend’s child was playing music in a local show, and that event got shut down. Once again, so many plans were shifted, just when we were beginning to think it was time to venture out into the world again. It felt like a trick.

One of my favourite things about right now, even with case counts rising locally, is how far away most of us are from that moment in which the idea of other people having fun made everybody furious. As Miranda Featherstone writes in today’s New York Times, “I am tired of judging the Covid choices of strangers.” I got tired a long time ago. For the last year, as vaccines arrived, I’ve been overjoyed to see my friends returning to the activities and pursuits that define their lives. Even sports. I hate sports. But I’m overjoyed at the sight of a packed stadium, and not just because I don’t have to be there. It means the world. It means connection. I welcome every little bit of it.

And in some ways, even with the infernal loop of decline and rise of case counts, things are starting to feel a bit less loopy? That friend’s child got to play their show the other week. Plenty of pals went away for March Break for the first time in three years. The cookbook writer Emiko Davies, who I started following on Instagram in March 2020, when Italy (where she lives) went into lockdown, has finally travelled to Australia with her children to see her parents. All these people I don’t even know—Sarah Harmer’s FINALLY getting to go on tour for her album Are You Gone? There is a week in May when I’m going to two evening concerts and a theatre matinee!

I love it. I’m here for it. Get vaccinated and booster, put on your fucking mask, and let’s do it.

On March 16 2020, we were due to fly to Manchester to visit my husband’s parents, and our one-year-old niece. My husband’s father was very ill from cancer, which made this trip especially pressing, and I still remember, the week before our departure, talking with my dermatologist about how it was going to be fine, and it was Italy and Iran that were the hot-spots. I remember how stressed out we’d been the week before that, riding the TTC and anxiously applying hand sanitizer, and how I’d shout at my children not to touch anything. They just couldn’t get sick. Because a pandemic is very a bad time to be flying across the world with a bronchial infection.

But of course, we didn’t go at all. That week following my appointment at the dermatologist (the last crowded waiting room I ever sat in) was one in which we all lived through about a decade of shifts and radical change, it became clear that travelling at this moment would not be responsible, and it would have been halfway through our time in the UK anyway in which the Prime Minister would have implored us all to come home. It would have been stressful beyond belief, and I know that cancelling our trip was the right thing to do that moment.

Two weeks from today, we’re scheduled to try again. And in some ways that is driving me crazy, especially as case counts rise. As though I were the centre of a sci-fi plot and this elusive trip to the UK a destiny in front of which the universe is determined to throw up walls, make impossible. Like Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll every time she tries not to die. (Cue Harry Nilsson).

Although I even have a rational side that knows it’s probably going to happen. (!!) And knows too how wondrously cathartic it’s going to be when it finally does, to finally break the spell, to close that loop. Fingers crossed.