When Covid-19 stopped the track in our global game of musical chairs, I had arrived in France just a few months earlier, attempting to emerge from a personal period of isolation. It had already gone sideways.
I had barely washed the smell of Los Angeles out of my clothes before the French transit strike kicked off at the beginning of December 2019. The ideal location of my newly rented home in a tiny village in Northern France which was just minutes walk from the train station was immediately not so ideal. The strike went on for months, requiring me to walk in the freezing cold and mud for multiple hours to get to a store to get food and the ever important cat litter. Which, for someone with chronic illnesses like severe asthma, was not an ideal situation.
I also had to postpone my first trip to see someone I knew, a friend in London. A disappointment, to be sure. But having just arrived in France with nothing but 2 cats and a laptop, escaping a collapsing country with lack of health care, inability to afford rent, and a rather unpleasant situation involving being targeted by Nazis that included death threats mailed to my home which basically shut down my entire life — a few months of disrupted comfort didn’t feel too terrible. I was still in an unbelievably better situation than I had been just months before. I could wait.
Holidays went by. (Not having any family due to them being dead, I don’t really do “holidays” anyway.) January ended with me getting sick and I was still recovering (but not contagious) by February.
But then the strike finally subsided and I could book my ticket to London. Still coughing up gross amounts of crap from my asthma-damage-ridden lungs, I made it across the Channel. I soaked in the ability to speak and hear English. I got food at restaurants for the first time in months. And when I was in my rickety hotel room, I had the news on.
Reports were non-stop. The new virus was spreading. The hug I had gotten from the friend I met for lunch on February 7, 2020 ended up being the last physical contact I’ve had from another human (aside from some very stressful and upsetting crowded train rides I was forced on due to French visa administration).
It’s been 11 months since that hug.
At first, the isolation wasn’t that bad. I grew up an only child in the woods with no internet until I was a teenager. I was born to be alone in the woods. My friend who lives here in the village and I would talk (masked, socially distanced, while taking our weekly grocery shopping trip) about how silly it was for people to be upset over isolating themselves for a few weeks, marveling at seemingly “normal” people climbing the walls and writing op-eds about the desperation of being alone through the first round of lockdowns. Even through the cancellation of my trip to Scotland that would have been in June, I knew I’d get there eventually, and I was calm. Shit happens. Let’s just all not die.
Summer was rough. To my chronically-ill horror, lockdowns were lifted. People pretended plague didn’t exist and went into free-for-all party mode. I remained isolated. What else could I do? Even if I wanted to risk getting myself killed with plague by traveling, I could only go somewhere in France. International travel was not on the table. And I don’t speak French. It’s hard to learn French when you are isolated, no matter how many audiobooks and duolingo lessons you attempt to finish. I wasn’t going to make friends traveling during plague. And I wasn’t going to travel because I don’t have a death wish.
The inevitable resurgence (I hate to even call it that, the fucking plague was here the whole time, surging) came in autumn, and I could start to feel it wearing on me. It’s hard to know or attempt to separate what I’m experiencing because of plague from what I’m experiencing because of being in a new country, because of the trauma that happened to get me here, or because of *gestures at everything*. They are inextricably fused into a mass of PTSD-ridden nonsense like multiple strings of kilometers-long Christmas lights that have been sitting in the hot, dusty attic of your brain for years, and also they’ve recently been gnawed on by raccoons who have moved into the attic and then when you come home after a weekend vacation and when you open the door, you find multiple angry raccoons in your living room having fallen through the ceiling and been unable to get out while you were gone and now you have to wait for animal control to come get them while they tear apart your couch and piss in your houseplants.
(That raccoon story was not mine, the raccoons fell through the roof of one of the writers’ offices of a Shonda Rhimes show some years ago at Prospect Studios in Los Feliz? Or is that Silverlake? Wow I’ve been gone from LA for a while now.)
A lot of what I felt was anger. Every asshole not wearing a mask on the train. Every clueless shop worker with their nose sticking out of their mask. Everyone taking their mask down to smoke in my goddamn face while I was risking my life to get groceries. This wasn’t carelessness. This was half the population of the world purposely trying to murder me. Chronically Ill people have always been prone to genocide, but this really made everyone say their inside thoughts out loud.
Then there were the thoughts of how grateful I am to not be in the US right now as Los Angeles is telling their first responders to not bring people with low survival odds to the hospital. I am all too familiar with Los Angeles first responders, and many have not come across as someone who should be making these types of decisions. Only 40% of French people want the vaccine, and right now the government can’t seem to distribute them, but I’m still so much safer here. The US is one of the lowest bars you can measure off of and I shouldn’t have to feel so lucky here, but I do.
Only in the past month or so have I feeling what could be called lonely. Everything I’ve given up or missed out on hasn’t bothered me. It’s the looking forward part that’s gone wonky. I guess that was hope. I was hoping to make friends. I was hoping that the isolation that I was going through before I got here was going to end. I was ready to put in the work to make it end.
The most isolating part of my isolation how I feel alone in my isolation. That sounds redundant but let me finish. Early on, there were slogans thrown about of us all being in this together. Of a collective hardship. And obviously the many frontline workers dealing with this plague have an entirely different pile of problems. And us chronically ill people have an entirely different pile of problems. Those of us without jobs and/or in poverty have an entirely different pile of problems. There are endless intersections. Endless piles. compounding on one-another.
The trouble is that all my piles end in isolation. Chronically ill during plague = isolation. In a country where I hardly know anyone or speak the language = isolation. No job = isolation. Dead family = isolation. It’s isolation all the way down. (Why is it never turtles?? I love turtles.) I don’t know anyone in a similar situation. I can’t even find strangers in the same situation. I’ve tried.
Who knows how much longer it’ll be this way. It could be a year. It could be forever. Either way I need something besides the suggestion that I deal with my isolation, both plague-induced and otherwise, by Skype-calling people that don’t exist. As I wrap up what will be a year without physical human contact, I may be forced to accept that I need more in my life than two cats and a laptop sometime soon. (I’m thinking maybe dog?)
