Quotidian Scenes From Isolation

Words & photography by Carla Gras

I’ve never related to medial words, words that reached halfway, describing neither the good nor the bad, but just. the maybe, the perhaps, the okay. Those words that can be understood with a soft shrug of the shoulders, a facial expression somewhere between a smile and a frown. Right there, the between. Get it ? That’s where I feel most comfortable right now. 

It feels like the world has pressed pause; we’re not really going anywhere, kind of hanging out, kind of waiting, kind of terrified. 

This pause makes everything else harder: you cannot go back, you cannot move forward, we simply must do the present, work through the right now. But how can we do that when we aren’t actually allowed to do anything? Cycling through activities that aren’t actually active; reading the news and rewinding the podcast a few times because we keep getting distracted by something in the kitchen. We send our family group chats photos of our cats in a dismayed attempt of reassurance, between daily messages of “Is everyone doing okay?”

A few years ago, when I was going through a breakup, my best friend told me to embody a shark. 

“You have to keep swimming, keep moving at all times. If you stop, that’s when it’ll hit you. Sharks are always moving. Be a shark.” 

My household has been in complete isolation for 26 days now. And everyday I keep moving; I bake and I do yoga and I reply to e-mails and I watch too many true crime docu-series in a row. I send my partner dumb memes across the room and fold laundry straight out of the dryer. 

But it’s when I stop, at the end of the day, that it finds its way in, creeping through my veins and my open eyelids in the dark. The panic. The unknown. This endless in-between. And I cry, I cry and I cry. And then I go to sleep, and wake up the next morning, and do it all over again.

We’re in a tunnel where we can’t see the beginning nor the end anymore it is dark and everything looks the same and no one knows how far we’ve gotten and how much further is left to go. 

So I rely on the daily. On the mundane. On the quotidian habits of existing in order to keep myself grounded and sane. Small moments of serenity. In spite of all of this, this unknown and discomfort, these are the things that keep us rooted in our very existence.