By Nina Joss
March 28
I spend much of my days talking on screens to people I love. Some across oceans, some minutes away. It’s strange—for many, this period is antisocial and isolation, but I feel just as social as I normally am. I like how it levels the playing field, in a way—I feel closer in distance to Iga (in Chile) when I talk to her the same way I do Grace (15 minutes away) and AP (in Richmond). It makes us all farther, but it’s also a common and uniform amount of far-ness.
It’s almost hard to keep up with everyone during this time. It’s a good fullness, of course, but this is less socially restful than I would imagine quarantine to be.
March 30
Juan from the Galapagos just texted us.
My family met him while we were there for Christmas. He was there on vacation with his girlfriend, who he lives with in Spain.
He sent a message just checking in to see how everyone was doing. We made the group chat after meeting on a snorkel tour, a group of about ten of us, so that we could send pictures afterwards. We had fun together that day, we got beers after and shared life stories. But no one had talked in that group chat for months.
How special it is, friends from faraway in distance and time—reaching out again, reconnecting,
experiencing something together somehow—
despite distance and time,
because of distance and time.
Because this virus seems to make both of those things not matter anymore. It seems to defy both. To have power over both. To make both seem blurred, erased, indefinite, uniform—there are no differences in distance and time anymore.