Unpacking and unpicking: Curry and Covid
How clearly can you remember the path the year has taken?
When I visualise those months stemming from 23rd March 2020, they look like a clear plastic takeaway box. You can see everything smushed up inside it, the food rolling over itself, crammed to the very corners – but, with this ‘takeaway’, you can’t take off the lid and sort out the contents.
Everything that happened, in those dry months, is encased in my memory with no chronology. Really, it could’ve all happened in any order. If I try to separate in my mind the relentless baking from the crying over Normal People from the reading outdoors from the discussions of what constituted 2 metres from the ‘Zoom’ quizzes from the self-imposed rigorous walks, I fail. It’s not like separating potatoes from veg. All I can do is watch the memories swim around in the box in a current of curry, and accept that sometimes it’s impossible to have a record of things in the exact way that they happened.
Occasionally, I do wish that I’d kept a journal through lockdown. A place to immortalise what we did, and a way to identify when we actually did it. More and more, however, I’ve realised that my personal lack of a journal is actually one of the most truthful things about my experience of lockdown. My infrequent diary entries, sporadic to-do lists and random pieces of writing exude the truthfulness that is this: lockdown was not linear.
Lockdown for me, and, I suspect, for many, was a jumble of phases and feelings – most of which were extremely repetitive. Fear about restrictions reoccurred, enjoyment of being in nature reoccurred, discomfort at having no conversation starters reoccurred, the gladness of being able to chat virtually reoccured… Every feeling was temporary, before it swooped cyclically back around again. As with a takeaway curry, that one piece of veg you’re picky about will keep reappearing. Now, it’s speculation, more than anything else, that seems to reoccur. Will the schools really, viably stay open for long? Will the universities let everyone in who, second-time-around, got their grades? What will Christmas look like this year? Do you think we’ll be able to go away next year? Is there going to be a huge ‘second wave’?
At the end of the day, I personally feel that it’s ok for us to not remember lockdown with the clarity many of us we wish we had. Of course, everyone is different and I very much applaud and respect those who have kept a regular track of lockdown life. But, like the image of a sealed takeaway curry box, looking back at these months with no vision of order, progression or completion might be the most truthful way of understanding them. After all, you can’t unmake a curry.
Author: Megan Bruton
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