You live alone in a bedsit which is damp. You’ve stayed here for five months now, and have yet to see a single familiar face on the stair. You think about living with someone else, or just being around people you recognise, a lot. But staying in the middle of a city full of libraries, pubs, cafes, offers the reassuring backdrop of large numbers of people on a daily basis. Is this enough, though? You wonder at what point human contact becomes, human contact. A smile? A greeting? A hug? A kiss? These feel like very niche considerations and many people think you’re quite odd for dwelling on them.
*
A packed-out ceilidh in a community hall where you can see hundreds of sweaty hands held and lots of flushed euphoric faces. The point of the dances is to mix together as many bodies as possible. Through a series of accidents you end up at an after party. Various people you don’t really know end up sleeping in the living room and somehow in the morning it seems like two of them had sex. This feels a bit risqué; even amongst a crowd of youngish folk, who go to events and touch each other and sweat together. Then again, in this city, with its long history of overcrowded tenements; the act could also be seen as entirely in keeping with local tradition.
*
Perhaps the greatest, and certainly one of the smallest, pubs in the world is already eerily quiet for a Saturday. Here and elsewhere the pub is love for many, but also now a deeply anti-social place to be. Many are condemning pub attendance on social media with smart content about exponential curves. Tonight, regulars hang together and rely instead on the stoicism of the oldest, which they feel make it worth the risk. “It’s like with everything else, eh?” says one of the most generous. Elsewhere, you hear of elderly relatives advance stockpiling boxes of wine. Old age will soon be spoken of almost entirely in terms of vulnerability. But of all the pieces of armour you could need in such moments of ending: a sense of perspective, and knowing how to take the edge off, are surely invaluable.
*
You work with a laptop: you lack a desk, but manage on the sofa. Some people you love do the same. Other people you love work with their hands: you think about them a lot and wonder at how little their lives have changed, and how little this continuity is considered as narratives unfold. Almost half the country’s workforce remains compelled to risk daily exposure to the virus, often with bodies entirely unprotected. You sit in your bedsit and type.
*
Old ideas of poverty and salvation keep coming up: in particular African American spirituals, in which death and hardship reign supreme, but which offer a sticky, simple, message in return: make the most of it while you can.
*
You have the worst anxiety dream of your life, which leaves you awake for hours, unable to shake it. You later read an article about how this experience has become common throughout the population. You wonder if the cause is not simply anxiety, but also the dream-like quality of living through vivid change. Soon the challenge becomes more obvious: how can self-care, with its demand to think small and slow, take place amid events so big and fast?
*
You tell yourself that you need to drink less so that you can read more. You fail to take up yoga.
*
You get high on the freshness of evening city air. This means a lot because you grew up on an island: but here in the heart of the city, for the first time in centuries, are lungfuls of exceptional purity. This, combined with the lengthening of the days, reminds you of who you had once been. Waves of glorious memories of drinking as a teenager while being nourished by the spring freshness and returning light follow, memories of so much first contact.
*
There is a point around seven in the evening when the sun slants down through one of the two windows of the bedsit. This becomes your favourite spot to sit on a cushion and talk on the phone, or just to look out the window and listen to the magpies in the roof. The flats across the street get the sun in the afternoon. There is a man who somehow manages to lie on his back, with most of his torso stretched out of a top floor window, in order to sunbathe.
*
You find a raft of new paths and quieter spots in the city you’ve lived in for so long. Beyond the suburban outer ring of roundabouts and Tescos there were sweet places waiting that you had never considered. You know you could have researched these routes earlier, but really, you’re glad that you didn’t, and that you discovered them instead by accident, at your own pace. Closer to the city centre, there is so much emptiness amongst the multi-million pound real estate. What, you wonder, would someone have paid to get all of it to themselves? For several days in a row; you get it all to yourself for free.
*
You move flat. The landlord sends an extensive email about how bad a tenant you have been: items on the charge sheet include a mark where your hand has touched the wall too often. Despite paying half of your monthly income for this space: you have failed to adequately erase traces of your body from it, and they want you to pay more.
*
Thankfully the new place is cheaper, earthier, familiar, already a bit famous, and comes with human connection built-in. A change in your state of mind follows. After fifteen years of adulthood defined by its opposite, you struggle to name it initially, but soon it becomes clear: you feel settled.
*
Having not touched another human being for three months, you see a lack of resilience in your inner life reflected everywhere: the allure of abundance cancelled. This total chasteness could be unprecedented, but arguably your younger self held out for far longer. Due to coincidence rather than romance, the first person you kiss before and after lockdown will be the same person. In these inconstant times: this feels like a heady dose of consistency.
*
Soon you go cycling with friends as the summer brings incremental freedoms. Each day-trip contains all the excitement of a childhood holiday. As during most Scottish summers, you soon remember that you’ll drop anything for a couple of tins in the park on a sunny day, but there is an extra urgency now; it is all the more finite. The people you spend time with would be classified as ‘close contacts’ if you become infected; because you were within two metres of each other for 15 minutes or more.
*
One late summer night you hear the alien sound of live music in the distance. It turns out to be real, but the rules restrict such performances to outdoor venues. The music and performance of your past, on the other hand, can only really come alive in confined spaces. You know of many people left utterly bereft at this sudden disappearance. The bouncing frequencies from the distant PA underline this hard truth. Over the years so many shows did go on despite so much, even though at some point in its lifespan, any show will feel slightly impossible to mount. These things thrive on the incidental, in the range of tiny sparks that people in the same space can create without knowing it.
*
On a newly car-free street brilliant autumn colours blanket the ground: forming a canopy above your head and a blanket at your feet. This creates the illusion of a tunnel. It seems utterly bizarre that cars could ever have driven through such a fine place, and that this experience is entirely novel.
*
For those who prefer to organise and curate their social lives; the new highly-structured norms for socialising probably work a treat. For others, this creates a social world punctuated by intense bursts of social contact, followed by many sparse days which you fill with the pretence that you’ll write a novel; a novel that will make your solitude commendable.
*
You unexpectedly find yourself with a boyfriend and a weekend routine based on takeaway, mutually enabling each other’s vices, and going to galleries. With visitor numbers still low, you get to enjoy the experience of sitting next to someone and looking at the same picture for ages. You have so much to say to each other about what you can and can’t see: made all the easier by the fact that, unlike him, you know almost nothing about painting. He doesn’t meet your friends because that remains at best impractical and at worst illegal. Yet remarkably, the act of holding him at night, when a wee bit drunk and stoned, connects your brain directly to the memory of all the other people you love, but have barely seen for so long. You have a consistent series of rich and deep dreams about seeing those people again, presented across a host of possible futures. You wake up and feel amazement that the world has not killed this man who mirrors your own vulnerability, followed by waves of gratitude that it has space in it for such gentleness, for such dreaming.
*
You tell yourself that you need to drink less so that you can read more. You fail to take up yoga.
*
Later, when he is gone from your life, you share a smile with a stranger in the street and wonder if, maybe, we are all straining towards that possibility, infinite – the idea that we could live together; and be held again like children; in the dream-state of human contact.