Take the Trash Out
March 2020
The building is so quiet that when the bin is being wheeled out from the patio to the street at 7 pm every night, I can hear the sound from my 4th-floor apartment. Sometimes, I wonder if I am the only one here. I know that my neighbour in 4 Derecha has been gone for weeks. One afternoon, when I hear footsteps at her door and the sound of a key turning, I tiptoe to my door and open the keyhole. She is standing there wearing a blue mask and holding an overnight bag. There is more silver in her hair but she looks healthy. In that moment of relief, I realise I had mentally been holding my breath, wondering if she was alright.
The first week, every random cough and sniffle makes me wonder if I am alright. Every thought of a person I know makes me wonder if they will get through this time alive. News reports have me questioning how long this will last, what will happen to my master’s programme, what if it gets worse back home in Nigeria where the fragile healthcare system cannot even care for citizens in normal climes. I also worry about my friends and family who are medical personnel across the world.
Regardless, I handle it well. The articles say you should maintain a routine, so that is what I do. I dress up in outside clothes during the day and I make a point to only work at my desk in my living room. Not on the couch and not in my bedroom. They say you should try learning a new skill; well, I do need to figure out cooking for survival, anyway. Stay in touch with loved ones, everyone advises. I am trying. I am doing ok, really. Until the week I get my period in the first month. That is the same week the death count starts rising by over a hundred daily in Spain. Madrid, where I live, is the epicentre of it all. It is the week I start finding out that people I know are sick. It is also when the messages from my parents start.
“I am fine and not going out, so there’s no need to check in every day, I promise,” I write back after a few days of waking to a WhatsApp from my mum and emails from my dad referring to the news out of Spain and asking if I am fine. I understand their worry but since I decided to avoid the news and deactivate my social media accounts, I know I have to stem the messages if I don’t want anxiety flowing from my mornings through my nights.
What I really want to write back is this:
I am afraid of taking the trash out. I stopped using the elevator even before the lockdown but now I am afraid to take the trash out because when I get to the bottom of the stairs, I have to touch the door in the lobby, press the release for the street door and pull open that door, just to get to the bin. Then, I have to open the bin lid, enter my 5-digit passcode to get back in, push the main door, the lobby door, and touch the outside of my apartment door. And I worry that, somewhere in all that, I might get infected.
I worry about friends who are sick and, after I go shopping to stock up for what might be another month or two, my worry intensifies. I start coughing that week. It is dry and it feels like something is stuck in my throat. I think about dying alone in my apartment in a country where I have no family. That week, my stomach is a pit of emptiness caving into itself again and again. I barely eat. I try to hold back coughs. I pray. I barely sleep. I clear my throat repeatedly. I drink hot water and dissolve Vitamin C pills in regular water. More than anything, I cry for a world that seems to be rotting at the bones. The trash piles.
Some mornings, I think I am good. You know, I start the day calm and focused but then find myself crying till my head hurts because, as I put a Vit C in my cup, I realise that I had neglected using them for months until a few weeks ago and I really should have paid better attention and taken things more seriously than I did.
“How are you keeping?” T asks me one night.
“My darling, considering everything, I am well,” I write back. “The Lord keeps me, even when my mind is a seesaw.”
“You don’t sound good, Ra,” she says. “You sound like you’re trying to hold it together but you’re not really ok.”
“I have to hold it together. I have felt a lot of grief this week. And fear. But who knows when this will end? So I need to hide in God, no? When I look to God, I’m fine. I am not afraid of dying, you know. That is not it. It is everything else hanging. God is so kind to me, in all this. So kind. And I feel weak. Like nothing. But I am carried. So, I am well. Considering everything.”
“I’m so sorry, Ra,” she says.
That evening, I realise that this thing is more terror than virus and I am not fine. For me, that is the darkest part.
Post-Winter 2020
Spring brings with it brightness, even if I can’t go out much. It has been a couple of weeks since I first talked myself into taking the trash out and walking to the pharmacy to get paracetamol and Strepsils that cleared the cough in 2 days. It feels like a weight of worry off my chest and I return to focusing on projects I enjoy; cooking—which I still hate; and talking with friends. I order a Ravensburger Krypt in Silver and start slowly working on the imageless jigsaw when it arrives.
Every day, I sit and tell God the things I am thankful for. It helps me to remember that my life is filled with good. I give myself one big task per day: Just finish or do XYZ, and you can call it a good day. The days seem to gallop by in April and I am grateful for that too. I regain some of the weight I lost in March, and I go to the store to restock.
I am changing in unexpected ways. I realise this one afternoon when I try several times without success to buy flour because I am craving puff-puff, which I have never made. I become a person who orders costillas and prawns like they’re going out of stock—a person who marinates ribs and glazes them. I learn how to make wraps. I make stir fry, burgers, mash potatoes. Then Nigerian food—ogbono, asaro, a perfect pot of jollof, ayamase, moi-moi—things I’ve never tried or desired to make in the past. I am surprised by the ways I have chosen to soothe the ache in my soul. Surprised to find that I have brought home with me and I am daily burrowing deeper in the comfort and safety of it like a tortoise in its shell. Soon, I don’t hate cooking so much.
Once every few days, I check the news about Spain and Nigeria, more comfortably so when they no longer impact my mood. The days run into May, June, July and I am amazed by how time seems to move faster when I’m indoors; I had expected the opposite. Spain releases a de-escalation plan. My master’s rushes to an end, with me spacing out a lot through the last couple of months, giving a speech via Zoom at my class graduation, and wanting it all to end. And when it does, I feel untethered. Exhausted. Days of poor sleep and eating catching up with me and knocking me down.
That’s when I start walking and walking and walking and walking.
