In a few days, on Saturday 13 March exactly, I will celebrate the first year of the creation of these diaries.
One full year of Corona.
Things changed so much since. And not. As expected and announced after the first two weeks of lockdown, I (we) adapted quite well to the situation and managed to continue living, and to enjoy doing so.
To celebrate this first year, I will try to connect with my one-year-old-corona-self in several posts during this week. I will try to explore my thoughts in the past 12 months and how they evolved (or if they did), and i will try to put some order in what i did and didn’t do in the same period. Another thing I would like to do is to try to fill the gap between the first lockdown period (roughly March to July 2020) and today; ever since we started going out and meeting other people again (albeit with restrictions), I felt less and less the need to write and draw here. But i was taking a lot of notes and scribbling ideas on notebooks to be drawn later; I hope I will manage to excavate some of those in the upcoming days.
I will close this birthday introduction by a text that I wrote on a diary-like notebook less than two weeks after the beginning of the first lockdown (it is the page on the right in the picture and you will find the english translation below it).
26.3.20 – 4:44 PM
Day 14 of the lockdown to fight the Corona pandemic.
This notebook is in front of me, and I am using it order to spare another one, because I am scared of a shortage in paper should the crisis last. It is incredible how much my (our) attitude towards this situation evolved in only two weeks.
Friday 13 March is the first day of our self-imposed lockdown. The morning before, 4 hours before the departure, I cancelled my two-day trip to Ireland to play a concert at the University College Cork. I had suddenly realised the gravity of the situation (and decided to listen to Racha’s injunctions) . We also decided not to send the girls to school on that Friday (the official closing of the schools happened the next Tuesday). On Monday, we received an email saying that the parents of one student in Nour’s class tested positive for the virus. We were ordered to quarantine for 14 days. It was easy since this was exactly what we decided to do anyways. But the fear of all of us being infected made the lockdown more painful. Fortunately, the said student was later tested negative.
The first days I was still surprised and angry when I was told that another gig got cancelled in April. I always wanted to say “but let’s wait and see, maybe it would have passed by then”.
Today I am rather asking myself if we’ll ever get out of here, and in which condition.
This text, that i found a couple of weeks ago while putting some order in my home studio, is interesting for me for various reasons. First of all, it is written for myself and not in the purpose of future publication, and as such, it is a bland and crude description of the events so far, in the language I use the most to write to myself (I usually speak to myself in Arabic). Second, it is the only occurrence where I speak of something I was scared of without daring to say it in public, because I felt (and I still feel) it was completely indecent to talk about it while people were at best loosing their jobs and at worse dying in hospitals: the fear of a paper shortage. Yes, it was a real phobia I had during the first three months. Last but not least, the text’s ending reminded me that the possibility that we might face this new situation for a very long period of time came to my mind early-on, even though I wouldn’t discuss this with others at this point; somehow I only admitted this idea to myself back then, hoping that this will avoid its materialisation.