I Think I Love You, Quarantine
by Damien Belliveau
Can we quarantine forever, please?
Can we slow things down and have nowhere to go and alternate between movies and books and eating and yoga and sleeping for as long as we live?
Can we sit on the sofa and smoke weed? Stream stand-up comedy? Play Scrabble in our pajamas on Thursday or Tuesday or whatever night this is?
We can wake up without alarms and approach each new day with zero urgency.
We can clean the stove deeply and dust all the bookshelves and Windex the outside side of the windows.
We can move objects around the apartment and find the perfect place for that picture of us in Seattle on my birthday.
And the plants — you can get your Google on and finally figure out what’s going on with the ferns.
What’s that? Aphids? What the fuck is an aphid? [Shrug.]
Anyway, now they’ve got a new lease on life. Thank you, quarantine!
Speaking of healthy flora — the Earth is loving Human quarantine.
Look out the window. See how crisp the sky is thanks to quarantine. The cumulus clouds are more bulbous and the other clouds that are like feathers — cirrus clouds, yes! — they look more feathery than ever before. They shimmer! And when rain comes it falls more gently, softer.
The environment is for sure enjoying quarantine.
We can be thankful (truly grateful!) thanks to quarantine.
We can look at our devices and be okay with the distraction. We can welcome one another’s curiosity in the outside world. We can enjoy it even. We can laugh. Together.
With a little imagination we’ll never run out of things to do.
I beg you — can we quarantine forever? Please!
I feel like I can really relax for once. I feel like everything is simpler. I feel like coffee in the morning and a beer with lunch and an afternoon tea and a glass of wine at night with dinner while we wonder what Westworld is trying to accomplish is perfect.
Let our government send us checks. (It’s our money anyway.)
Give me quarantine! Or give me death!
We can cuddle with the cats and embrace long conversations with friends and family. We can FaceTime with our parents. We can tell them we love them and miss them and appreciate them. And we can do it now because our schedule has never been so wide open.
It’s an eight-hour time difference calling London…
Hello!
Hello?
My mother & her partner are outside their local pub holding pints. Other blokes wander around behind them — closer than six feet — smoking fags. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
Why aren’t you inside — quarantining?!
Oh no we’re fine. It’s not that bad here yet.
Go home! Quarantine!
We can’t be cooped up all day.
I can. I love it. I could quarantine forever.
A 2020 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Damien Belliveau is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and has spent over a decade telling stories in the world of reality television as an editor and director at Bunim-Murray Productions. The founder of The PartBlack Project, a Q&A photography series documenting ethnically mixed people like himself, Damien is working on his first memoir.
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