Immediate Household Only

In March 2020, I was told I could quarantine only with my "immediate household." This is where, if you're one to look at stills from movies or just images from the internet, I am wiping the palm of my hand down the side of my face, looking in the direction of my roommate's closed door, and cringing.

In February 2020, my little sister told me via psych hospital pay phone that our relationship was over, forever. Sure, there is a particular sadness about being in a psychiatric facility, but I was utterly destroyed. I was there just to save our relationship. This is what can be called: too little too late.

I write frequently about that experience and one other. This one is possibly more important. My ex-boyfriend yelled at me one night in a rage and told me I was the most uninteresting person he knew. That he was bored with me. I had no interests, no hobbies. And I didn't. That's where my writing stems from: the humiliation of being no one at all.

It stems from being alone in my apartment besides one other person I didn't care to get to know during an international pandemic, where instead of being outside on the street fighting zombies, I was inside with nothing to do. I know how I can be interesting, I thought. I researched writing websites and joined Prose. Here's how I can both redeem myself and make myself more interesting.

It became a bit of an obsession. I remember my first piece, pieces, even, and I cringe. They weren't very good. Later, I developed a flow that makes sense - I hope, now. But then? I was parsing wild thoughts onto the blank page, with no experience or identity to think of.

Writing, and writing in particular on Prose, developed me as a human being. It became about being more than an interesting, or a worthwhile, decent human being - it became about finding out who I had become. I unraveled my past and decided I could recover from those two conversations.

Writing to an audience of strangers is one of the most freeing things I've ever done. I can write about mental illness and psych ward until my fingers run dry, without worrying about being judged.

I've attended open mics and read off things I've written for this website. My voice does not shake. A year after our pay phone conversation, I sent my little sister pieces I've since had published in journals. They are about our childhood. She said, these are good. I want to read more.

And perhaps my ex-boyfriend is out there, somewhere, existing as the angry, unhappy man he is. And maybe one day he'll hear of me, and feel sorry for himself. Nothing will have changed but me.

But that is the beauty of writing: it is for ourselves. It is for who I have become, someone who processes life events through a keyboard. In March 2020, quarantine was supposed to be a month long. I wasn't sure how long I'd be writing, but I'm happy to say it has not stopped, like the madness and discipline of disease.