Entry #9

   Someone I knew died recently - he passed away noiselessly in early October and it was not until recently that word of his death spread quite like fire from mouth to mouth. Or, to be more exact, from screen to screen. In a year full of ups and downs, heading from one small disaster to a new one, this one death shocked and shattered the quietness of quarantine. 

  I thankfully spend the second quarantine by myself, in complete isolation using the excuse of empty days to empty my mind and balance whatever there is left of it after a roller coaster of a year. A lot of things remain unprocessed and I do wonder not just when the world will go into some sort of balance but also how long it will take for each community and individual to do so as well. In a state of collective trauma that varies in levels, reality is sometimes difficult to stay in touch with. 

  And that is exactly how I have been experiencing life lately: in a state of disassociation as if most components are not real, as if we have entered a parenthesis that at the end of we will be able to go back to our lives as we knew them from before, except not all components of our past will be there. And this crisis has pointed out all the many ways in which our previous reality was fragile at best.

  But I digress. On a quiet evening in Athens, looking at the building from across the street at the opposite apartment, death slid quietly in my DMs. For the first time I realized that there is no normality to go back to. For once everything opens back up, whenever that happens, whenever we can hug friends and acquaintances that we see on the street without wondering whether or not we have exposed each other irrevocably to harm, we won't go back to life as we knew it for that life will no longer be there. Going back to our favorite places, the bars and schools we frequented, we will realize that stepping out of our house will also feel like stepping in a photograph with holes in it. 

  We will go back, maybe, but not all of us. 

  And it makes you wonder, who will I go back to? How long and what quality of time do I have left with people I love? How have I been using it? How will I use it? Time feels more and more elastic but more often than not it's as if we're experiencing it on the verge of breaking. We feel the cracks around us seem to thicken, how do we grasp life truly back? 

  I struggle for the answers.

  I have not found one. 

  I hope you found the peace you craved in whatever you went.