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ARTS AND CULTURE

The discomfort of apartness

  • 28 April 2020
There are so many things that a global health crisis brings to a standstill. The paths of aeroplanes, lighting up the sky above an airport suburb. The hum of restaurants after 5pm. Concerts, plays, stand-up, cabaret, opera. The clinking of glasses. The weird and unwelcome intimacy of hearing your coworker flush a toilet.

We live in strange, uncanny times. Cruise ships have become Flying Dutchmans and hand sanitiser the stuff of ambrosia. Pandemic fictions have become a source of comfort and familiarity. Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera has been lovingly parodied in countless tweets and by SBS Comedy.

But I keep going back to a short story, by Carmen Maria Machado in her book Her Body and Other Parties, called ‘Inventory’. In its simplest terms, the story is a narrator’s list of her lovers loved: boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbours, strangers. From this inventory emerges, bit by bit, the story that has made the list necessary: an epidemic is ravaging the world’s population. There is no vaccine, but as a woman from the narrator’s community tells her as they are lying in bed together, ‘the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact... If people would just stay apart—’.

Machado’s story is from 2017, long before the current pandemic turned our old lives into the stuff of history. What goes unsaid by the narrator is that in times of crisis, the balm of physical contact is both a precious commodity and a source of intimate danger. Over the last few weeks, affection and social proximity have become something approximate to the top tier of the food pyramid: consumption to be restricted; consider what you could do without. If you live alone, if you are able-bodied and have no dependents, much of the reigning health advice is easy to follow — but some things are hard, as well.

Though my phone rings every night, and my dad has gotten WhatsApp for the first time in his life, I find myself missing hugs, and making lists of things that feel obsolete: one-night stands, wakes, the communal pressure of group exercise, the sense of companionship in watching a movie side-by-side, picnic rugs. I buy locally and donate to homeless support services; my friends and I Skype each other while watching the same documentary on Netflix.

Still, my days are dulled by a feeling of what I can best describe as discomfort, a word
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