When this letter finds you, I hope that you are well.
That you are smiling and enjoying the first days of the marching spring. Reclining in your worn-out garden chaise longue, among the carefully trimmed grass and the purple pansies, eating ‘apricot spoon sweet’ straight out of the jar.
As for me, I would say that I am well…
That both of us are just fine.
I would be lying.
I have no energy left within me to lie to you anymore.
Things have been challenging.
I always remember the way you smiled to me when we reunited, a constant reassurance and I long for it with each passing day. Will everything be alright? It has been a year now into the pandemic, and the world around me changed in more ways than I can count, even in this small, forgotten village by the cerulean sea.
Darkness seemed to have made a permanent residence over the bereft roads. It didn’t matter if the sun was out or not, the world had lost its splendour and liveliness, leaving behind empty and silent ruins of what used to be. Everything was dull, an endless winter. The government failed us -as it always seems to do. Silence descended upon the houses like a thick veil, bringing along with it a foreboding sensation that the world would never be the same again.
‘Είθε να ζήσεις σε ενδιαφέροντες καιρούς.’
‘May you live in interesting times’; no wonder ‘interesting’ could be considered a curse…
People responded to the pandemic the same way they did a hundred years ago, two hundred, and many more. Disbelief, realization, fear. They withdrew. Will we survive this? A tragedy like the ones we had read about in history books, in ‘The Betrothed’ or Thucydides’ ‘History’, a ground zero that levelled humanity and all we had worked for. Nothing seemed normal anymore. Our balance had been overthrown.
Numb. Afraid. Alone.
Unable to fight an enemy we could not see, touch or understand, we locked ourselves inside our own homes. We waited. Patiently. For the enemy to breach the last sanctuary we had. Close in on it. Slip through the cracks under the door, through the gaps in the windows. We assumed refuge; no such sanctuary existed. Our houses were no longer safe and we waited for the inevitable siege, for the enemy to kill us. Because it killed so devastatingly many of us.