Growing something out of grief

There is no way to avoid the state of grief the world is experiencing. The prevailing lamentations over the ripped and shredded fabrics of being, the reticent mourning, the colossal loss of life, social connection, economic safety and predictability. While I find myself subsumed in this collective act of grieving, I am also becoming aware that I am forlornly grieving my own personal loss as well. 

I am spending my days learning and unlearning things while in the midriff of this cataclysm. And it’s been barely mere weeks on the crisis clock for me — and you. My mind flails between what feels like a constant state of cognitive decline and the iridescent consciousness of my surroundings. Some days, I am actively reading the news, worrying about my family and arguing with my parents over their ludicrous attitude toward the pandemic — a crisis of prodigious proportion — and on other days, I am completely spacing out as the global counter of data on positive cases and deaths swells online. I falter between nonchalance and vigilance. Some days, I am struck by jolts of motivation to look after myself and loved ones, and at other times I am burdened by the open-endedness of this calamity.  

There is something unsettling about being alone in times of crisis; it either makes you run toward people you love or escape from them entirely. The physical isolation lets loneliness seep into one’s headspace. At the beginning of the outbreak, I was both lonely and alone in Europe. I spent my days watching the world come together while I drifted away from the very people I would normally turn to. Being marooned in these stern circumstances, being told what to do and not to do, has found a way of depleting me of love at times in past weeks. The past weeks will mark the blurriest and bluest period of my life, and even though I maintained continual “online” connection with my family back home I experienced such surges of debilitating anxiety emanating from constantly pondering over what I can’t control. 

*

LONDON. March 23,  2020. It’s Monday. The global death toll of COVID-19 has passed 15,000. Tonight, my body has been hijacked by panic. I am in my hotel room in central London where I’ve slept many nights after having two cochlear implants planted under my scalp. I am sitting at a round glass table with the window — slightly open — carrying in the cacophonous din of Bloomsbury. I am surrounded by the sound of dozens of clinics and hospitals. I wonder if this is what Georgian urbanism always sounds like.  

It’s 7 pm. Outside my room’s window, the screams of the passing ambulance sirens seem to ignore the prime minister’s speech that’s being aired live. Screeching sirens muffle his fried up voice on TV. The sound of political leadership in crisis is drowned out by noise.

I am thinking of home — home as a word. It’s been weeks of living in a place that is so different from where I spend my every day. I feel in limbo and the UK has just entered lockdown. I am in limbo, it’s not a metaphor. My brain enters a vacuum where all the possibilities shrink inviting a sense of being trapped. The speech goes on and so do the ambulances’ blares. I am losing count of my days while thinking of home. My heart is not anywhere in particular. I think of my parents, my family, my school, the street I grew up in and my former lovers. Home feels more palpable when I think of my best friend and his baladi dog. Home feels real as I think of my mother’s body — now older — roaming around my bed at night making sure I am sleeping warm. In crisis, I forget the age of my own memories. I am overcome by a sudden warm wave of realization: I have to go back. I want to go back. It makes little sense as airports are shutting down their runways and airlines have suspended their flights. Crews are being laid off and I figure I can’t go anywhere. 

The world is going into lockdown. The world has never felt small and I have never felt more invisible. I am trying my best to keep my brain’s survival mode engaged and active. I have to survive this. If I want my loved ones to survive it, I need to survive too. I talk to my family and friends. It is good to exist in other people’s lives. But then we hang up and I am alone in my central London hotel room again. I don’t have a choice, but my panicked self can’t help teetering between wanting to go back to my apartment in Sharjah and my family home in Cairo. 

The rush of air coming from the window blows into the cavern of my ears. The feeling no longer bothers me, nor the sirens, or the noise. My brain is slowly acknowledging the sounds of London after gripping my senses, forcing me to know the city’s sounds even though I don’t belong there. It hit me that the din of crisis will be different once, if and when, I go back home.

CAIRO.  March 28, 2020. It’s Saturday. The global death toll of COVID-19 has nearly doubled since Monday. It’s my first day at home. I feel calm. I am ruminating over my decisions, but I also feel a little sedated. I am in bed tracking the amalgam of sounds that have always been there albeit pitched higher than my hearing range. Across the hallway, in our family apartment in Cairo, my parents are watching the news and chatting. I hear the channels being switched. In the next room, my brother is humming a faint ballad. Our household is louder than I thought. On my room’s wall, I hear the clock tick tirelessly — a metronome to my thoughts.  

I am feeling at ease. I am more aware of my emotions—how I feel now and how I should have felt back in London. My senses are aligning. I am feeling it all at once now after coming out of survival mode. Right now, I am where I should be, yet a wave of confusion still shuffles over me as I occupy my usual space where I grew up. Home sounds so different now. It feels different.  I am self-isolating myself in my room, but I am struck by hearing things that I don’t see. I feel too present and it is as disorienting as it can possibly be. But nothing felt more disorienting than the moment I stepped out of the small plane at one o’clock in the early morning hours of the day before.

*

It’s Friday. I am clutching the armrest of my seat as we land. The aircraft’s tires and brakes are screeching into the late hours of the curfew. From above, Cairo looks unfamiliar; the city lights are still blazing like they have always been, but the stillness of life feels eerie. The city feels wrong and so does the world.

 I descend the staircase from the small aircraft and find myself in the airport’s quarantine zone where blood samples are taken for testing. A team of physicians dressed in white protective suits and geared up from head to toe await in the quarantine ward at one of the airport’s gates. Hands moving, eyes blinking and heads nodding. The ward is neon bright. There is nothing to see but overburdened eyes behind medical goggles. Outside the ward some officers stand with surgical masks covering half of their faces. I can’t shake off the intimidation I am feeling being in a room full of masked faces. Being deaf, I typically rely on lipreading for hearing. Voices murmur around me. The sound of stress is inaudible dialogue and bodies shifting in discomfort, heavy, sucking up the air in the room. Before I succumb to anxiety, I leave the makeshift ward and walk out into a deserted arrival hall.

*

I am losing track of the days a little. I am spending them sitting by the window, glancing at the passersby and rumbling cars. I keep thinking to myself that there is nothing for me out there. Am I even supposed to be here? Was it wise or even logical to come back? My thoughts are suspended between the fill of loneliness I felt in London and the uncertainty that lingers around being in isolation with my family at home. With each passing day, the streets keep getting emptier and the distance between me and the world feels as though it is growing wider. Being in isolation, I can feel time sending loneliness tantrums my way while also sending me back to the friendships I have abandoned many springs ago. Isolation invokes loneliness and anxiety which can be both crippling and formative at once. As my thoughts coalesce and the feeling of danger ebbs, I gradually realize that I might have been lonely long before the world’s apocalyptic episode started.