Living with Covid (in the house)
By: Mario Lopez-Goicoechea
Tags: Self Improvement, Covid 19, Personal Development, Writing, Relationships

December 2020

Day 1

“Sorry, guys, but the test has come back positive”. The words felt like a hammer blow.

Covid-19 had just arrived home.

Worldwide, 2020 has already been an annus horribilis. Coronavirus has swept through every single country, regardless of GDP or religion. As an English language teacher, I was one of the first ones to be made aware of the devastation wreaked by this most unwelcome visitor. My school, like all the others in the UK, closed down in late March.

Yet, deep within my psyche (and I only came to this conclusion after reading and re-reading the text from my landlord to both my housemate and me letting us know that he’d contracted the virus) was the thought that all this was happening somewhere else. How reality-defying must one be before reality imposes itself? Sometimes in the most unaccommodating of circumstances.

I rang my girlfriend immediately to tell her the news. She, too, would have to inform her housemate. Our Christmas plans would have to be cancelled, much to our disappointment. My self-isolation would have to start straight away.

My girlfriend’s voice was tender and reassuring. A balm amidst so much disillusion. We both agreed that the situation at the moment was not as grim as it looked. I did not have the virus. I just lived with someone who did. I told her that since I’d got the text I’d been overcome by a sense of paranoia, stupid as it might sound. How many times had I touched the same surfaces my landlord had touched, I kept wondering? How many times had I brought my hands to my face after?

There wasn’t much point in fretting over it, though. You can’t re-write the past, anymore than you can re-write 2020.

Day 2

I woke up to the sound of the coffee-grinder in the kitchen. Although I occupy one of the rooms at the top, when the house is silent, I can hear almost every single sound, no matter how faint.

Last night my landlord sent us both my housemate and me a kitchen timetable, including the hours when he planned to use it.

With the blinds all the way up, I contemplated the day outside. Plenty of early-morning low clouds presaged rain. By the looks of it, the night had been pretty wet, too. There were several puddles in back gardens, forming pewter mirrors on solid concrete.

I went back to bed, but not to sleep. I was now well and truly awake. I kept replaying the words in the text from last night in my head. Luckily, in recent years meditation has become a much-welcome tool, not just to help me grow mentally and spiritually, but also for moments like this one, when I feel troubled. I began to take deep breaths and empty my mind at the same time. During ten or fifteen minutes, I lay on my bed, motionless, opening myself up to the sounds coming through the cracks of my closed window and paying attention to my breathing.

After a while, I got up again. A couple of magpies were executing what looked like a fun aerial dance around the bare branches of the tree under my window. I could see the foundations of a nest being laid.

Corvids building. Covid wrecking. I wish I were less of a language geek sometimes.