Thoughts in Quarantine

I sit on a chair, overlooking a vast suburban-scape. It’s quiet and only a few cars run through its streets. There’s a virus outside, and nearly everyone is inside hiding from it. Looking out at endless white concrete roofs - pierced at times by varying shades of green and molded by the grey streams of asphalt that drive towards a city center where rivers are paved over and hulking shopping malls lay empty - this was never my idea of peaceful contemplation. But a blanket of serenity now covers this city where I was born, and now, again, the wind is heard in the rustling of heavy, hair-like palm tree leaves, telling us all the same things it had always told us: everything moves, but nothing changes. 

Time now goes by so quickly that I count the weeks as days, the days as hours; the hours lump together into afternoons and nights. The Sun is always running away from me. By the time I wake, my easterly window shows a parched and bright landscape of short shadows, and by the time I venture out, my front door opens west unto that green and mountainous south which perennially uplifts the moist caribbean air. The white of the clouds it creates offers the Sun an escape hatch. The door closes, and I only see its straight, guava-colored arms hanging unto the horizon as if it were climbing down the side of the world. 

Down and out of my sunny, easterly window, a large, grey dog barks at a fruit tree. In the neighboring house a large man somehow decided, or not, to put on a matching hat and t-shirt to mow the weeds in his backyard. The job and the noise die quickly, but in the air still penetrates the shrieking whirl of some machine in some house somewhere nearby. Someone is doing a root canal on this otherwise perfect, white and blue day. And I wonder if these people have felt or now feel the things I do. Perhaps the weed trimmer isn’t the only heavy weight that he carries. How many of these white roofs house the same longing to see someone in another, far away, but close at heart? It’s easy to talk to friends even now that they’re not here, yet imagine going back in time and talking to them before you ever met. You couldn’t possibly say anything that was any less difficult than the first thing you ever said to each other. Anybody down in that white city is connected to me and isn’t, and everyone I call on beyond that horizon where the sun presumably still runs is too, or not, and the only thing separating the two is time and what we’ve done with it. Connection is temporal.

The wind has stopped talking, and I can feel my own body heat lingering around me. I am still listening. I momentarily forget I am terrified of heights, lean over a white metal railing with chipping paint that tickles my forearm, and wait to hear if this city has any answers for me. It hasn’t had any in thirty-one years. I only hear my own questions again about how some can be so far yet so close and here with me, and some so close in front of me yet so far and disconnected. Connection may be temporal, but a quarantine fifteen stories of concrete high and hot and long enough to bake a person tender shows that time is but the space to long for that connection. And that is missing - it’s a presence felt close even though the nearest things are the heat, and the wind that takes it away. 

Jorge Jimenez is a first-year International Affairs student at SIPA concentrating in Urban and Social Policy.