The Space Between Us
There is a space between us that wasn’t there before, I think.
When we pulled apart, like gum from my teeth, we stretched ourselves thin.
Some of us snapped. Some of us wilted. Some of us hung on by a thread.
Some of us were fine, by all accounts — but no one on Earth was unaffected. There is a space between us — it’s murky, deceiving — sits in your peripheral vision, like if you were to turn your head or get distracted, you just might miss it.
It’s a sort of muddy puddle you don’t realise is six inches deep and thick with decaying life until it’s stuck to your trouser leg, soggy and cold and seeping through to your bones.
This space, it happened slowly and then all at once — the way people describe falling in love, or realising you’re gay, or hitting thirty and thinking — oh. This is happening. This is life, and I’m here, right in the middle of the universe.
It started with a few months of low chatter, a sort of rumbling, and we stood at the edge of the tracks knowing the train would come past — we just didn’t realise how fast, or how loud, and so we didn’t think to find purchase on the rails before it knocked us off our feet.
And then, we’re on our backs, heads ringing and a light show flashing behind our eyelids. And beside me, someone coughs.
The stores are a wasteland. A mother, with five children hanging from her like tiny monkeys in the jungle, fly past with a trolley full of frozen food. These tiny monkeys, like any animal with a basic survival instinct, know something isn’t right. They don’t pester for a McDonalds, or a Kinder egg, they just hang on tight and close their eyes to it all.
People get greedy. That survival instinct again. It’s eat or be eaten, and apparently, that applies to toilet roll. There’s none of it, and for two weeks, my mother and I ration our few boxes of tissue and kitchen roll.
Elderly people who shake on their walking frames sway in front of the desolate tinned soup aisle, picking up the last can of chicken and vegetable from the floor, dented and leaking.
There are stickers on the floor and posters on the walls, masks and face coverings and plastic face shields that look one step away from being hazmat suit helmets. Plastic screens go up, and everyone obediently stays 2 metres away from each other. The space grows.
The news gets entirely depressing. News is never happy, exactly — but my local news station was always good with the comic relief, or the happy, hope-inspiring stories wedged smartly between the tragedy and devastation.
I tune in every evening to watch the Prime Minister, Chief Medical Advisor or the Chancellor of the Exchequer give a live update.
Boris, Chris Whitty and Rishi, to the Brits.
They explain the curve and the r rate, all things I nod to while I sip my coffee as if I understand what they’re talking about. I understand numbers, though. Every day they grow. The South of England is the least affected, with lower infection rates than the rest of the UK. A saving grace. The sort of luck that eventually has to run dry. It does.
They reiterate to wear masks. To have empathy for your fellow humans, and stay away from them. To understand that this thing, it’s bigger than any one of us, that we all have a shared responsibility to keep others safe. We listen. We murmur agreement. We don’t like it, but most of us do it anyway. Then the government cuts their own Achilles’ heel and has prominent members breaking the rules, driving cross country and gallivanting off on a staycation. A friend of a friend coughs, and a week later, dies. The space grows.
I don’t go to the shops for months. Not since I screamed at a woman in too-bright lycra in the middle of Tesco when she’d pushed past me, no mask, face inches away from mine.
Have you been living under a rock? I’d yelled, and she was the most affronted I’ve ever seen anyone, or do you just not care that there’s a global pandemic?
I’d dumped my basket of food and walked out of the shop, and kept walking, sort of dazed and just slightly out of consciousness, until I noticed that my socks were damp and I was stood in the middle of wet, marshy common land that looked about how I felt. I sank to the floor and sobbed. The space got lonelier.
There was nothing to do. Nothing. I realise, about 8 months and two lockdowns in, that for an introvert, I really bloody like people. And I miss them.
There’s nothing to do, so I politely inform my mum one morning that she and I are going to clear the 4-foot mound of dirt and stone left over from the extension they’d had done when I was 4. She’s so bored, watching Jessica Fletcher reruns she’s seen 5 times already, that she agrees without hesitation. For 3 weeks, she and I eat breakfast together and start at about 10 am. For 3 weeks, she project manages and I dig and dig and haul and dig and — oh, shit, I think I’ve pulled something — and I drag and drop and dig some more.
I’m pasty white — except, now I’m tanned and there are muscles in my arms and my shoulders and my back that I don’t ever work when I’m scribbling thoughts into a notebook.
It’s hard work. It’s back-breaking, finger-callousing, sweat-dripping hard work. It’s possibly the best 3 weeks of my life. I stop watching the news.
We sit on the little patio area we’ve created, mum and I. We’d found the floor to a coal cellar when we hit level with the rest of the garden, and we gathered all the chunks of coal we could find and put them in a neat little pile. The patio tiles that have been living at the bottom of the garden are laid down. We lay turf, and build a flower bed, and we sit there one evening, a coal fire crackling in an old barbeque, and admire our work as the last remnants of the evening sun bleeds through the conifer trees and bathes the garden in a glittering gold.
Across the space, I can see something — I have to squint, but it’s there. A little wildflower, struggling up through the dirt.
The months drag into almost a year, and my unassuming little town becomes national headline news when some truly stupid people hold a rave in an abandoned warehouse.
The numbers in my town skyrocket.
Someone’s nan dies.
I feel the telltale symptoms of depression start to seep into my blood again, and this time I don’t want to do pills that make my head feel like cotton wool.
I start a business.
It’s a modest little thing, and calling it ‘my business’ is an indulgence, really, one that makes me feel more important than I am. It’s a copywriting business, and I work freelance.
It’s rocky at the start, like most things would be if you decide on a whim at 9 pm that, yes, I’m going to do this — and then spend the whole night researching and writing and taking notes.
I get clients and — to my own surprise — I’m actually quite good at it.
I start an Instagram page. There, I post my poetry and my musings and the tiny, intimate little chunks of myself I break off and throw into the wind with bated breath, praying that people don’t totally hate the words I write that keep my mind a little less loud.
I put it under a pseudonym, of course, because I’m terrified at the idea of people knowing me. Sort of paradoxical to the point of poetry, I suppose.
But it helps me breathe. When I write, that is. It’s like every scratch of my pen against grainy paper, every tap-tap of my keyboard forces my lungs open a little more.
Suddenly, there’s a vaccine. People are wary — and I can’t blame them. I’m wary too.
It’s being offered to our elderly first, and the most at risk.
People are wary, because what usually takes 10 years to create takes a matter of months, and I understand the fear and the distrust and the uncertainty. I tell them it’s a good thing. They tell me to do my research.
I vaguely wonder if they’ve considered that, perhaps, the people with doctorates and degrees and years of experience and billions in funding have, too, done their research. And that, perhaps, it’s a little more in-depth than Gary’s 30 minutes on Google and Yahoo!
I’m called up with the over 60’s, which I find a little insulting, but accurate mentally nonetheless.
I stand in the spaced-out queue with Barbara’s and Derdrie’s and try not to notice their angry gazes drilling into the back of my 20-something skull.
For a while, I thought it was because of my asthma. It can’t have been, because older fellow asthmatics weren’t being called up.
Now, I think it’s because of the Tourettes. I’m still trying to find the correlation.
The vaccines happen fast. They’re rolled out across the country, and NHS workers all over sign up to jab people, and then we’re getting through tens of thousands of people every day.
Our health service becomes our backbone. We cheer and clap for them on our doorsteps. We play music loud and dance in the streets, neighbours I’d never spoken to coming out, chatting, calling across the way, laughing.
We put rainbows up in our windows.
We repeat thank you, NHS, like a prayer.
The space is still there — sort of gaping — but that one wildflower turns into 5, then 10, and then there’s a smattering of colour against the dull browns and greys.
Lockdown lifts.
Finally, finally.
Too soon for some people.
We’re told we don’t have to wear masks, too. Too early for that for me, so I still do — most people do, too. Most businesses still make it compulsory.
It makes people who should really find better things to be angry about, very angry.
I see my best friend for the first time in almost a year, finally not 200 miles away and on my phone screen. When I step towards her, she steps back, a sort of waltz we’ve grown to dance with people, this invisible force keeping this space between us.
“I’m sorry,” she says, the sorriest I’ve ever seen anyone look, “I’m not comfortable yet. It’s not that I don’t trust you, I just-” I drop the arms that were going to wrap her up in a hug and my heart breaks a little bit. “It’s okay. I get it.” Because I do.
I see my brother. I see my niece, a lockdown baby who, last time I checked, definitely couldn’t run around the garden, dragging me with her with a tiny hand wrapped around my finger and surprising strength.
I see my family. It’s sort of giddy, but we’re British and awkward so we don’t do emotions or acknowledge the excitement at seeing each other again.
I hug my sister, tell her that I missed her. She tells me she missed me, too.
I see my best friend again, a month later. We’re meeting up with some other friends (“don’t worry, socially distanced, I’ve spoken to them,”) — and as we’re walking along the Road to Nowhere — a desolate half-built road in the marshy common I found myself ripping at the seams in a year ago — and I’m chattering about nothing of any importance, she stops dead — and when I turn around, she pulls me into a bone-crushing kind of hug. The best kind.
I haven’t stopped holding my breath when people walk past. I haven’t stopped smiling at strangers, just to realise too late it probably looks like I’m dogging them up, because they can’t see my mouth, and they don’t know me well enough to read the crinkles at the edge of my eyes.
But people are out again. There’s toilet roll, and soup, enough for everyone to share. There’s the friend I made at the vaccine centre, who was a little too loud and brash for anyone else to make conversation with her as she told me her life story — exactly my kind of person.
There’s me, realising that I’m not stuck, and it’s not too late to go out and meet people that make life a little easier. That life is too short to not speak to the people I find interesting and funny and incredible. That dreams don’t have to be just that, and that I can have the things I want if I can only build up the courage to reach out and grab them.
I look up clubs and poetry readings and spoken word nights and LGBTQ+ friendly bars, and I make a list I promise myself I’ll visit “when this is all over.”
And so, the space is there. I don’t know if it’ll shrink — it’s sort of just there now, something we’ve all learned to live with. Some of us have even learned to thrive in it.
And I look out across the space that is now less a smattering and more an ocean of colours, more vibrant each day than the last, and something on the horizon catches my eye.
A figure — a hand raises, and across the tumbling wildflower ocean and marshy wetness that I’ve been alone in for so long, they wave. And I realise, perhaps a year too late or perhaps perfectly on time, that there will always be space. So my legs move towards them, and with each step, I make that space a little smaller.
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