May 21, 2021 Commentary from a cold room

May 21, 2021 Commentary from a cold room: No I am not in a morgue. I am in this space I have created for myself. A room. All the windows are blacked out. A womb. Here I can sit – pitch dark – even when the sun is blazing outside. A space where time and space both seem to get confused. One projector, creating the verisimilitude of different Worlds – from the crematoriums of India to the wanton violence of Capone in Chicago. This is the lockdown space. In lockdowns, in darkness sliced by the projector beam, place disappears from sight. It is the image on the large screen that matters. It is an attempt to deny the reality of place and create that post-COVID-19 place where one can be anywhere and everywhere. Relationships are not based on touch but being there together, on the screen, and connected. But reality tends to creep in, as it did today. In a good way. The efforts of support are becoming concrete. Met, in flesh and blood, with a kind soul, one who is helping out as well. We worked out the plans and the way to move forward to address a matter that is not about to quietly go away. I can see it in my surroundings. A recent COVID-19 recoveree, young too, lamented of a deep lethargy even after 21 days. It is all in multiples of 7. Seven to show the symptoms, 14 to be recovered, 21 to be normal and then some die after that. But the majority pull through. They go back to work and build their post-COVID-19 World. Which is about to be blown in different ways by the impending storm. Too early to tell what will happen, but the media is creating its rating-driven narrative of death and destruction and adding to the collective anxiety. My cousin sister called, newly widowed (non-COVID-19 death) and there was the palpable grief and the anxiety. I wish I could do something. Locked down. There is no way to go see her. Everything is over the phone - many calls, many conversations - time and place disappears. I roam endlessly, sitting in one place, my cold comfort of a room with a “projector” view. Eventually becoming the Floydian “Comfortably numb.” The post-COVID-19 World is a screen – smiles, gentle conversations, hurried disputes bereft of touch – the new reality – “just the basic facts, can you show me where it hurts?”