No Urge For Going
It’s been eight weeks since I last rode the subway.
Seven weeks since I saw the inside of a grocery store.
Four weeks since I stepped beyond the perimeter of my home or backyard.
At a certain point - as days turned into weeks turned into months - I figured I’d stop counting. But I haven’t. Instead, it’s this counting, this tallying of the time since something happened or the time until something’s supposed to, that gives structure and substance to my days. It reminds me of how lucky I am, to be able to measure what the pandemic has taken from me not in loss of life, but in loss of lifestyle.
At work – AKA the computer I gesture and emote and argue into all day – my colleagues are busy re-editing my clients’ commercials. They’re replacing scenes of raucous backyard barbecues with single-family gatherings. They’re redacting shots of multiple hands dunking chips into the same bowl of dip. They’re even removing jokes about sad office salads from scripts, since the phenomenon of hunching over a cubicle desk mechanically moving mesclun mix from fork to mouth is no longer relevant to our stay-at-home lifestyles. We all laugh at how stupid this is, but I also understand it. When I watch television now, I’m often shocked by how casually characters move around the world, cutting through throngs of people, pushing their way into crowded elevators, and clutching subway poles with nary a mask or glove in sight. I’ve absorbed our current reality so deeply that what feels strange now isn’t the moment we’re living through. It’s everything that came before it.
It makes me wonder what will become of travel. In a fundamental way, I am who I am because of the places I’ve gone. I came alive when I moved to Jamaica. I met my husband in the Czech Republic. I chased my dreams to New York. Travel has been one of the great transforming forces of my life. And yet, when I imagine traveling now, I don’t think of exploration, or growth, or excitement. I think of danger, fear, and anxiety. And when I look back on trips to Bangkok or Barcelona or even Baltimore, my mind is like a highlight reel of all the meals I shared, all the mouths I kissed, all the airplane headrests I nuzzled up against. I reflexively think, “How could I have been so cavalier about germs?”
Beyond being what I muse about during quiet moments, the future fate of travel could seriously impact all aspects of my life. At work, one of my clients, the world’s largest hotel chain, watched their business evaporate overnight as coronavirus swept across the globe. And so our business with them evaporated overnight too. Nobody needs advertisements for hotels that are closed. Or for airlines running near-empty. Or vacations nobody can take. Or cars with nowhere to go. The advertising industry, which has always felt unpredictable, feels doubly so now.
And if we don’t travel, I wonder, what will happen to me? If I stop moving, will I stop evolving? I take comfort in evidence to the contrary. One of the photographers I follow most fervently on Instagram, Jamie Beck, has turned her South of France quarantine into a creative opportunity with her daily #IsolationCreation series. Many of my friends have begun painting, or knitting, or constructing elaborate scenes atop unbaked loaves of focaccia. Last weekend, I finished the first draft of my memoir of motherhood. But I still worry, during long nights spent staring passively at TikTok or Netflix, whether sameness of place could result in sameness of self.
And when I look at Finnegan, I wonder: what will he take away from this time? If he spends these formative months or even years under house arrest – watching his parents leaving doorbells unanswered and disinfecting groceries and waiting three days ‘for the germs to die’ before opening packages – will he emerge afraid of the unknown? Or will the opposite impulse be forged in quarantine, an urge for going borne from how forbidden leaving home once was?
I hope it’s the latter. I hope that this time will be an anomaly. A story we tell. A passing phase. A thing that makes future adventures feel even sweeter. Because the alternative – we stay put, we get sick, we lose the things we hold dear – feels as scary as ever.