Click here if you missed Day 1, Day 2 or Day 3.
Day 4:
Today in new symptoms: shallow breathing! – coronavirus or clinical anxiety? Find out more after these messages. My sinuses also ached like I’d inhaled a great deal of seawater, I still didn’t have my sense of smell or taste back, and of course – the boredom was now well and truly beginning to settle in.
People from my past were coming out of the woodwork in their own isolation to ‘catch up’ and ‘maybe do a video call’. What news did I have to tell them? That Carole Baskin was guilty? This we all already knew. It should have comforted me to have people to talk to, but the truth was I’d become so sick of myself that I was actually unwilling to be in a phone call that I was involved in. It was like everywhere I went, there I was – being annoying. I was also experiencing a disquieting pattern where I would finally reply to people’s messages, only to have them proceed to send more.
What I really wanted was to go out and walk and live and do my little chores and go to work and do big choreographed dances in the street like New Yorkers do!
Feeling a bit emo, I spent some time staring out at the freedom tower. It mocked me with its freedom. “If I can’t be free, no one can”, I told my cat, who ignored me. She had been acting a bit off towards me all day. I wondered if we were in a fight, but tried to assure myself the enforced proximity was probably just getting to us both. But why was she spending so much time in the other room?
I made pesto rigatoni for dinner. The truth about pasta, which Big Penne is working so hard to cover up, is that without working taste buds it has an incredibly rubbery texture that can border on the offensive. Bereft of my sense, all I was left with was a bowl of tubular sorrow.
After roaming my little space all day, I lay in bed and thought about how, proportionately, a hamster actually lived a bit better than me. A studio with a loft? That’s what I was shooting for. Having trouble sleeping, I called my mum in her own quarantine in New Zealand who seemed very excited to have a chance to help me. She did that relaxation exercise for me over the phone where you tell the person to relax each part of their body, one by one. She included the butt muscles and we both started laughing.
Read Day 5 of Simone’s coronavirus diary here.
