A Story of Five Quarantines in Four Cities

The spaces within which I spent my five quarantines during my Master’s degree

After arriving in each location, I spent the first fourteen days alone in isolation. Spend enough time in one place and you absorb characteristics of that place. I became the walls, the bed, I became the water pressure, I became the cold air leaking through the windows. And always travelling with me, my depression — Darkness, my old friend, whom I know better than anyone else now after all of my travels this year.

The Airbnb in London is chosen specifically because it has a garden. It is my first quarantine. The room is the shape of a shipping container, a brown-shingled box with a tidily arranged interior. When you walk in, a bathroom the size of a fingernail tucked into a corner; then, the kitchenette with a sink and a pull-out stove on wheels which tucks perfectly beneath the counter; a thin table with wobbly legs pushed against the window; a bureau also serving as a bookshelf; a couch that pulls out into a double bed. Space is economical. The window looks out into a small garden and a coop filled with three chickens.

My goal is 10K steps every day. It is 10 steps across the width of the shipping-container room. Another 5 steps out the house, down the stairs. 30 steps to mince around the perimeter of the garden. 10 steps to circle around the chicken coop. Back and forth, back and forth, around and around.

The depression is never far, but it is small and demure and slips away whenever we make eye contact, like the fox I see one…

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