In Manitoba, tight COVID-19 restrictions are coming back. In Ontario and B.C., too, but Manitoba is closer to me because I have family there, because I can picture the people and the place.
Tighter restrictions haven’t been needed again here yet, but the time could come.
So have a look at this, at a piece of a column I wrote and didn’t publish during the lonely time earlier this year.
I wrote it, read it, tucked it away for being too revealing. But, in plenty of other parts of Canada, let alone the world, the shutters are coming back down as COVID-19 cases rise, and, invariably, because of stress and particularly loneliness, mental health issues will rise, too. We’re supposed to be social animals.
I tripped over the scrap of incomplete column last weekend, stored in a file titled “Emergency Column,” and I have been troubled about it ever since: after just a handful of weeks alone in the summer, with my wife Leslie helping for a few months after the birth of our granddaughter in Winnipeg, I was coming off the rails, more than a just little. I’m not proud of that — other people handle things better, I know. And others, worse.
•••
August sun coming in.
West-side early evening window.
Outside, the greens have gone to the late summer pales. No more fresh bright spring, and that seems apt. But you still have the things you have, and maybe you’ve begun to appreciate that. And you know enough to know that makes you one of the lucky ones.
Clock ticks steady on the wall. Music in another room, fine notes even like sand. Nothing will free you from this cord, this string, no matter how much you want it to.
Alone when you don’t want to be.
Alone, in a way that is sharp and clear.
No distractions. That’s the hard part. No way to bail out to somewhere else, because that’s what we’ve gotten so damned good at — distractions. Social media, entertainment, anything to keep from having to peer into our heads. Into our souls. We can always change the channel.
We’re not good at being with ourselves anymore. Especially in the quiet.
An ATV grumbles up the road. I wonder if it will turn in. It doesn’t.
I find this incredibly hard. I want the easy way out — the simple ease of friendly company — and I know now I’m not going to get it. Not tonight.
I’m going to get evening, twilight, darkness, one-two-three — but achingly slower than that — and I’m not sure that I’m even equipped anymore.
We’re not good at being with ourselves anymore. Especially in the quiet.
It’s going to be a clear hard night with bright stars, and I’m telling myself that it’s actually simple. That I just have to be open to it all until I’m tired enough to sleep, and then I will.
Not that simple, though.
I could start a bonfire, the kind of fire I’ve lit in years past for people who are now past, too, but I know that means that they’ll be back, however fleetingly, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Not by myself. So often now by myself.
But that’s the rub of it, isn’t it?
We are by ourselves. Or we will be.
I mean, you can be careful and thorough and glib, and you can machine the world into a place where you are never functionally alone. You can do it by artifice and by compromise. But the more you do, the harder the fall will be when you fail. The bigger the abyss that yawns.
I’m melodramatic, hey?
It’s true, though.
Tough it out if you like, but this is a raw truth, one that, if you don’t know it now, you will. And the harder you push it away, the harder it will come crashing home.
You can fight, in fact, the public belief seems to be that you’re always supposed to fight. But you will lose. Give in, even if it’s only in a small way.
I will rise tomorrow from this lonely night. Not better. Not stronger. Not more capable. Not even more comfortable.
But it will be enough to rise.
•••
That’s where the emergency column ended.
I lit that bonfire, met the ghosts. The night got cold. I let the fire burn until the wood was all gone and I was stiff and aching in a dew-dampened fabric lawn chair.
Slept little. Sank deep.
Give a thought to those who are alone, especially if things change and our shutters come down, too. Alone is far from easy for many among us.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
