Moving back in with parents, drinking too much, the loneliness of Zoom calls and feelings of detachment ... two writers in very different stages of life reflect on their circumstances
When I was forced out of my cheerfully ignorant denial about Covid-19 – the day I had to abandon a long anticipated three month stay in New York and fly back to Ireland – I still didn’t believe any of it. Even when my brother picked me up from the airport and drove me to my hometown, both of us in gloves and masks and I experienced for the first time that people who loved each other really were no longer touching, the unnatural stiffness of it all – even then I didn’t buy it. I knew logically it was happening, of course, and harboured no conspiracy theories, but still I could not credit it. “It can’t be real,” I thought to myself quite calmly, “Because there is no way I could bear it.”
I drink until I’m drunk and I talk to people. I find myself having long phone conversations with fairly arbitrary people
I’ve had my life, and one compensation of old age is a sense of detachment and an absence of fear. I’m just a spectator
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