Quarantine Journal:
Life in the time of lockdown Love in the time of Corona Retrospective of a failure
Every day is different. Life is a wave cit.
The best and the worst of the lockdown in Spain, described in a quarantine journal and an inner reportage about the highest and lowest points, reached from travellers stucked at home.
All the truth about the quarantine daily life, intertwined with a compelling and passionate drama about the love at the time of Corona, written with love and pain, but mostly with wine.
Quarantine Journal:
Life in the time of lockdown Love in the time of Corona Retrospective of a failure
Every day is different.
Life is a wave cit.
The best and the worst of the lockdown in Spain, described in a quarantine journal and an inner reportage about the highest and lowest points, reached from travellers stucked at home.
All the truth about the quarantine daily life, intertwined with a compelling and passionate drama about the love at the time of Corona, written with love and pain, but mostly with wine.
First month
Day 00
Quarantine Journal
14.03.20
I land at Gibraltar airport in the morning, people around are wearing masks, people on the way out are asking questions:
‘when was the last time you went back to Italy?’
‘At Christmas.’ I hear my mother’s disapproval for have let pass 3 months already.
‘From which airport are you arriving?’
‘From Reykiavik.’
‘All good, welcome!’
Welcome to my ass.
Spain declares the state of emergency and goes into lockdown 2 hours later, with the police already on the street sending people back into their houses. Too late for escape this time.
My flatmate L., a claustrophobic attack, and me, toast to the 15 days of quarantine that await us with the Corona, since there’s plenty around.
Day 04
Quarantine Journal
18.03.20
I think that boredom will turn me crazy. With gloves and broomstick I buid a trap to scare flatmate L. by beating his window in the middle of the night.
I send to my crush the video of the broom ambush to L. and after he wanders if any drug has been taken. My crush is very sharp because my flatmate already took them an hour ago, and now he sees things at the shadows of the chandelier.
I’m taking a bath. Along with my phone, which drowns and dies. And there’s the lockdown. And there’s no shops open to fix it. Isolation 4.0.
Day 08
Quarantine Journal
22.03.20
Flatmate D. inflates the doughnut for enjoy the pleasure to have a rooftop at home. D. does yoga, I do stretching, the neighbours do noise. We escape from the rooftop and return to the cell, our flat.
I paint, rediscovering forgotten habits. L. watches other zombie movies rediscovering the fear while I am hiding in the dark corners for terrorise him during the night.
On the bed, in front of a movie: ‘hope you won’t fart’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because my face is positioned in front of your ass.’ ‘Did you fart?’ ‘Didn’t you notice?’
Day 12
Quarantine Journal
26.03.20
I think I smoked 30 cigarettes. The living room is immersed in fog. If I don’t get killed by the virus and the growing madness, the smoke will.
4 hours and 18 minutes on video call with mum: ‘Right now we are all vulnerable. The soil is fertile for the fragilities to come out.’ What makes me fragile now are my own thoughts: I think about all the things I didn’t do when I could, when I was free, when I had the opportunities, and when I wasted them. Then I think no one knows when we will have them again. I can’t breath. Apparently neither my crush can’t, the crush with whom I’ve wasted too many of them.
Day 16
Quarantine Journal
30.03.20
Quarantine means mood swings. Depression, suffocation, boredom. Energy, joy, creativity, creation. Laugh.
Quarantine means confrontation, with flatmate L.:
‘you know that if you are a man and decide to have the sexual conversion they cut your penis and put what remains of it inside?’
‘Maybe I should try to do the opposite, and become a man.’
Flatemate L. slowly cheews my food.
‘Well, if you decide to become a woman, you should learn how to cook first.’
Quarantine means swing between trash food and healthy smoothies.
Day 20
Quarantine Journal
03.04.20
Today I am told that the quarantine in Spain will last 2 more weeks, at least.
Today I feel bad, because the only thing I want to do is run away, but this time I cannot escape anywhere. And I’m so angry, and I cry so much thinking about the time I wasted because I was afraid, and I miss the past, and the past doesn’t even seem past because nothing is happening and everything seems crystalized the moment before.
I wonder if the life I loved so much will go back to the way it was or if the future is lost.
Day 24
Quarantine Journal
07.04.20
Flatmate L. goes vegan.
His decision and the effort he’s investing for not waste the time of this quarantine, first makes me feel idle, lazy and boring, then inspires me. I resume my workouts. The fact that I smoke like a chimney doesn’t help me finish them though. I am out of breath, I can’t breathe. Even worse than the claustrophobia attack of Day 01.
I break all the cigarettes I have left and decide to stop smoking.
Day 28
Quarantine Journal
11.04.20
28 days later. 28 days later. We are bored and we are boring, I stand in front of the iMac screen and stay there, hypnotized in front of those side projects all day long.
For 28 days every night at 8 o’clock in the evening, all Spain applauds out the windows doctors, nurses, and those who works to save and help everyone.
Day 32
Quarantine Journal
15.04.20
Today L. cleaned the house. I had forgotten the floor has this colour. L. also keeps being vegan, continues his training, do his job, studies, writes his blog, and develops ecommerce.
D. and I drink and smoke. Sometimes we go drinking and smoking at the corner of the sofa, near to the window, near to the freedom.
Meanwhile L. meditates, saying that being seated in that uncomfortable position reactivates the energy, and that doing uncomfortable things in the morning helps to face the challenges during the day. I don’t know, to me the only challenge seems wake up and survive, the stomach acidity.
Day 36
Quarantine Journal
19.04.20
Breakfast. I drink the coffee in the kitchen to have a different point of view, L. prepares the smoothies while we talk about reincarnation.
L. would like to reincarnate into an insect or an animal that lives only one day to have different life experiences. I am admired, because I just told him that I would reincarnate in Trump.
Our blender after this statement explodes in front of my face while I’m tasting my delicious coffee.
I just invited myself to my crush’s flat, it seems like I exploded as well. ‘This week’ dude said.
D. and I eat pizza watching ‘The Lord of the Rings’ hoping to find our way in this middle-earth.
Day 40
Quarantine Journal
23.04.20
I paint dissolving clouds and flying beasts waiting for tomorrow. ‘This week.’
Video call with my friend and former flatmate quarantined in Lisbon: ‘I was pressing the space bar to pause you. Here’s how my quarantine is going.’
Day 44
Quarantine Journal
27.04.20
I wake up at 7.30 a.m. but I can’t get up. I get up at 10 a.m.
It always takes a long time to find the energy to start the working days during the quarantine. I schedule the cleaning plan but I don’t clean. It always takes a short time to find out your shift has arrived. Inevitable. Like death.
From this Saturday Spanish government will allow us to go out for a walk. Mum says that you walk because you are looking for something. Yourself.
Day 48
Quarantine Journal
01.05.20
This quarantine makes me throw away everything I don’t need. Clothes, jewellery, accumulated useless crap.
I’ve always loved rings. I took them off and leave just two. The ring from Dublin, the ring from my father. Freedom, love. Lightness.
This quarantine gives me herpes. Stress for my crush gives me herpes, while he keeps writing me that we could be out walking soon, but he doesn’t suggest when, while I don’t even ask him where.
Day 52
Quarantine Journal
05.05.20
I start eating fruit again, that with this nice mess I need vitamins.
I was thinking about all the things I hadn’t done when I could, when I was free, when I had opportunities, and when I wasted them. I thought about the things I hadn’t said, and I thought now I have a chance. Not that there’s a way to avoid it anyway, but at the end perhaps that’s how you become free, expressing your truths, as L. said.
I am afraid that if I will talk with my friend and with dude about this love trinagle I will lose both of them. Then I remember that with this quarantine we are living a collective hallucination through chats.
Even if all this emotions seems more real than reality.
Day 56
Quarantine Journal
09.05.20
I finally finish archiving the photos of my past and I understand that for live in the present maybe I should really figure how to be a woman. But then I reflect on what means to be a woman, concluding that there’s no reference, it’s relative, and I will happily remain a clumsy beast.
I rantle it to my person over the phone, while we talk about how in the outside world, now that we’re allow to go out, we’re slower and tired and we deviate our paths for keep the distance, because the other is scaring.
The other, here at La Linea, pours out onto the streets walking victoriously, spreading out, mastering and owning the space.
Do they ever experience freedom before?
Day 57
Quarantine Journal
10.05.20
I can’t stop thinking about you. You, who are keeping me awake, while in the middle of the night I am searching for you in the darkness, that even between these dreams and this darkness, my passion for you burns alive and I just can’t stop thinking about you, looking for you, forgetting about you. You, who are there, somewhere and somehow, at the same time and in the same night, waiting for me, looking for me, finding me. You, who are keeping me awake in the middle of another night. You, unstoppable and unforgettable thought. You, mosquito.
I don’t sleep tormented by my obsessions. I go back to the top of the mountain to understand what I should do. I understand it. I go back down and tell the dude I need to talk to him. Not understanding was better.
Day 64
Quarantine Journal
17.05.20
I’m going back to look for the cat. I can’t find the cat.
From the hallucination of the chat comes back also my crush, and then goes away. I cook for trying to forget, but instead I keep thinking about the cat, about what I feel for dude, about what I do not feel for my friend, and about what are the feelings of my crush – which I definitely do not understand. At this point the only thing which is clear, is that my friend P. was right, and the solution is to stay alone.
I’m looking for a flat in Tarifa.
I find a flat in Tarifa.
I book a flat in Tarifa.
Day 68
Quarantine Journal
21.05.20
It’s because my friend here in Spain told me, I realise that since we have been released, and are allowed to leave the house, that at 8 p.m. from the windows claps, whistles, and sings have disappeared. Like everything is over, when in reality is just about to begin.
Or maybe we just resent that nothing will ever go back to the way it was. Will we be able to remember how life was before all of this?
I sit composed in front of the iMac to develop my project, to let myself be absorbed by my project, to leave no room for thoughts other than those dedicated to my project.
Day 72
Quarantine Journal
25.05.20
Since today we can go to the beach. Playa Poniente, the one under the flat.
I lie on the sand to absorb every ray of sunshine to let the light dry the insipidness of this immovable everyday life.
D. swims. D. will freeze to death because the water is warmer in Antarctica than in this sea. D. however seems indifferent to the frost and swims happily. He probably had to take off the insipidness as well by diving into the salt water.
Day 76
Quarantine Journal
29.05.20
Saying that escaping from problems is never the solution, and saying that doing so requires a certain amount of resistance to pain for what has being left behind. Saying that there would always be an elegant way to leave.
Well, saying all, I think it’s really time to get the fuck out of here.
The information I am moving in Tarifa finds my friend in Spain in an unfortunate and unexpected way: during a meeting. Not exactly how I was hoping to tell him. With not exactly happy reactions.
I go out for enjoy my last evening in La Linea, needed also to distract myself from the misery of my love life. Speaking of love, while I am totally drunk nicely dancing Macarena in a random place, a guy declares his great love and passion to me.
And now the damn triangle has become a fucking square.
I imagine, at this point, at last, I am forced to admit - especially with myself - that I have a love and passionate crush for dude. Crash.
So, I escape from problems and I escape from love. I think that’s fine with me. Bye bye, adios, hasta la vista, saionara, leave me alone in Tarifa.
Last day with the guys. Last photo with the 3 of us together under this roof.
I love you.
Day 81
Quarantine Journal
03.06.20
Water. I am running by the ocean and over the lagoon, beside a river with the current flowing in one direction, ahead. I tidy up my thoughts and a sensation arises, that the time of Tarifa won’t be enough, that going back to what I had before does not make me feel serene, and even if I am missing what I had before, what I really feel is that it wasn’t enough. Like this time.
Then I undertand that another time is coming. I submit my job application to Greenpeace.
In Hong Kong.
Day 85
Quarantine Journal
07.06.20
Gratitude. Serenity.
The guys go back to La Linea.
I walk, write, and retrace the sensations of the trip that are still all over me. On the way home I buy a new packet of cigarettes. I go on the terrace, light one up, smoke it down. I go to the kitchen, pick the packet up, throw it down in the bin.
D. told me that thinking about the smoke while tripping could work. I stop smoking, and the side effect of quarantine number 02 – the cigarettes – disappears.
Day 89
Quarantine Journal
11.06.20
Dude reappears only to ask me if I have moved to Tarifa ‘for good’, as if he could even notice my absence in La Linea.
I’m so nervous about what he does and does not do, about what I did and did not do, and about all the opportunities I’ve screwed up, that I’m choking myself with ice lollies.
Life is made up of small pleasures.
The pleasure of getting fat.
Day 90
Quarantine Journal
12.06.20
I miss my friends.
I miss my family.
I miss my dog.
I miss a lot of things about life before the Corona, but the thing I miss most of all, and absolutely, terribly, to the point of going insane, is sex. I feel like I would easily be able to kidnap, detain, and take advantage of the Amazon guy on my next delivery.
I buy a crystal consolador to avoid ending up in jail for rape.
Day 94
Quarantine Journal
16.06.20
I think I spent the whole afternoon crying, cursing him for starting all of this, cursing at my own self for continuing it, and cursing this damn quarantine which with all its side effects, has to go to fuck off.
Enough for me, I give up. Because when you are not able to communicate, you compensate by doing, but if you don’t do anything, it’s just because you don’t care.
Day 99
Quarantine Journal
21.06.20
My friend M. slept with natural light, I slept with someone on the bed.
Spain officially reopens its borders. It’s the first day of summer. It’s my first swim of the season in the ocean. My friend M. leaves.
I walk towards the sun falling behind the Andalusian hills, and I feel it. The time has come. The time to do what I was waiting for so long to do. The time has come, to move in New York.
Day 103
Quarantine Journal
25.06.20
I have to get dressed during the day. Only because I don’t have curtains and I have new neighbours.
Day 107
Quarantine Journal
29.06.20
I don’t sleep, it’s too hot, too noisy, too itchy. The space is not as I need it, the silence is not as I want it, taking a shit makes me feel uncomfortable, and not being able to walk around the flat naked oppresses me.
At least I have a working WiFi, that’s what I was really missing.
I go for a run and try to distract myself, but while I’m running what distracts me are the faces all around, which distract me because I am looking for him.
Friday, at the airport.
Day 108
Quarantine Journal
30.06.20
D. buys a boat.
I feel pretty confident in saying that in the event my flight gets cancelled, Spain closes its borders, or Italy doesn’t allow me to return home, I will go to my dog paddling.
All the routines that made me feel good in Tarifa, make me feel better also in La Linea, there is only one thing I truly miss.
Friday, at the airport.
-3
Day 01
Quarantine Journal
15.03.20
My flatmate L. goes to the office, in Gibraltar. The other one is stuck in Morocco and has already changed his residency on Facebook. I am confined at home, cheering myselft up by calling my Italian friends who have been quarantined since the end of February. They reassure me so much that I have to escape on the rooftop because oh damn I can’t breathe I’m in prison I’m in jail please give me air.
Flatmate L. at 11 p.m. manages to cross the border with Gibraltar, and he reassure me too, reminding me that there is no more toilet paper at home.
A shitty situation.
Day 05
Quarantine Journal
19.03.20
While with gloves I build a tool for laughing at L. expences in the middle of a nervous breakdown, around Europe, with the lockdown, the number of infected people is increasing and in the hospitals there wern’t enough gloves and medical devices even before the pandemic.
At home we eat without restraints fearing the starvation. And we cook. Mushrooms. The good ones. Together with pancakes.
Day 09
Quarantine Journal
23.03.20
Washing yourself is important. Especially after flatmate L. – who has not washed himself for 5 days – tells me that I stink. I understand that the fateful moment to take a bath has arrived: I wash myself. And my conscience for had eaten a whole bar of chocolate. In any case I don’t believe that people in quarantine, shut at home are always perfumed.
Flatmate D. smiles happily. One of the benefits of microdosing.
Day 13
Quarantine Journal
27.03.20
I think I’ve swallowed 4,000 kcal. Flatmate D. bought the masks. At this stage of things, probably not for go out. We are more at risk of infection staying at home, between these walls, with these floors, in the stench of the showers than we don’t take.
Tonight, at midnight, there was an ambulance on the street in front of my building. A lady was taken to the hospital, a lady who doesn’t know if she will be take home after.
Day 17
Quarantine Journal
31.03.20
L. cooks vegetables, I cook pizza, my crush cooks me: ‘so when can I come to eat that pizza?’ We cook each other between flatmates: ‘would you feel uncomfortable with the infection if I meet a friend?’ ‘Man or woman?’ ‘Man’ ‘Why? We are not enough for you?’ Enough to believe.
The ultimate expression of freedom is to deprive yourself of your own by fighting for the freedom of all, caring more about other people’s health than our own, mental health. It looks like I will eat that pizza by myself without the dude.
Day 21
Quarantine Journal
04.04.20
When mum told me ‘the soil is fertile for the fragilities to come out’, I was thinking more about the difficulties related to the cultivation of weed rather than those related to the cultivation of the inner self.
Anyway, it seems that with physical containment you free your expression. As if not being able to move, require to balance by talking. With my crush. Unbelievable, but it seems that being physically blocked overcomes one’s emotional limitations.
L. has no intentions of being physically contained and starts doing regular workouts on the terrace, and runs, and meditates.
The only workout that D. and I do is the alcoholic one.
Day 25
Quarantine Journal
08.04.20
I keep smoking.
I’m also working, and nothing, at one point I have a flash of inspiration. I escape, yes, from love. A really nice awareness to achieve stuck in quarantine, in the state with the strictest lockdown in Europe, while falling in love with a guy I can’t see. I am so proud of my sense of timing. I also dream, a lot. Not only of not knowing where to go and being lost, but of losing. The trains, the flights, the opportunities.
I try to remain positive and optimistic by perfectioning the pizza recipe: eating makes you happy besides making you fat.
Day 29
Quarantine Journal
12.04.20
Mood of the day: pain. Pain for the evil we are doing to nature. I saw the plastic gloves in front of the supermarket floating as the plastic bag in ‘American Beauty’ was floating in the air. On the void.
I watch ‘The Colour Purple’, I cried, I send the movie to the dude while he was sending me his songs. This quarantine creates strange connections.
Day 33
Quarantine Journal
16.04.20
The stomach acidity last night was improved by drinking a whole bottle of strawberry wine, paying for its sweet and fruity consequences throughout the morning, until 7 p.m..
Unfortunately, however, not even the hungover can distract me from the news of a possible new lockdown extension. Until May 11th. I miss the air. I miss my life. I miss my friends. I miss him. I wonder what we all find at the end of all of this.
L. cooks burritos. Probably to be forgiven that after suggesting that all of us should have stay stuck in the flat, he is now totally in the grip of his love affair. After sabotaging mine.
Day 37
Quarantine Journal
20.04.20
From the chat with my person, always in quarantine in his flat in Milan, while I am trapped on my rooftop at La Linea.
‘What’s the sexiest, doing?’
‘I’m stuck in the operation – open the wardrobe and throw out anything that doesn’t give you joy.’
‘That’s a dangerous game:
A) because we’re not joyful people;
B) right now nothing gives joy;
C) start eliminating the most flammable rags and try another method. Throw anything that would embarrass you if you had an accident, were taken unconscious to the hospital. With the average customer’s shoes.’
‘When I will be taken to the hospital I want to get there without underwear, so even this is a dangerous game.’
Day 41
Quarantine Journal
24.04.20
Yellow water comes out of the sinks. Seal of the apocalypse.
During the night I dream when I was living in Milan. During the day I dream that my crush tells me when we can meet. It doesn’t happen. Too many expectations, too many hopes, too many illusions. Too much involvement. Everything is too much, and the worst side effect of this quarantine is that everything is amplified, that nothing can be kept under control and that every weakness becomes unbearable.
I escape between the rocks for watch the sea. Too much salt water in front the eyes.
Day 45
Quarantine Journal
28.04.20
Bank holiday. Today D. with all his seraphic being, officially summoned a flat meeting to announce that the time to wash the dishes and keep the sink clean, has come.
Today the rules of flat-sharing, that until now had been breakfast at 3 p.m. and dinner at wine, are established.
I run to visit my friend S. for spend the afternoon light and tipsy under the sun on the terrace, pretending to be free.
I return home and eat canned anchovies over the clean sink. I’m already drinking directly from the milk carton, I can’t remember since how long.
I’m really an adult, a man adult.
Day 49
Quarantine Journal
02.05.20
On call with my person. He is invited to do his first professional talk. His first histrionic professional talk.
I take a run on the terrace and destroy my shoes. My person suggests me to take a French 75 and let someone destroy something else. Like Sanchez, who destroy my negative expectations and today he really allow us to go out for walk.
I tell dude, so dude tells me we should meet at the top of the mountain. He jokes because he’s probably not aware that I take seriously everything he says.
Day 53
Quarantine Journal
06.05.20
D. and I are turning the living room into a jungle.
D. fortunately has the green thumb that I am missing, plant killer. We spend the afternoon looking for a contact with nature and universe. I’m also looking for a contact with myself to face the conversation with my friends.
As we plant the seeds I realise that I need breathing and more space. As we plant the seeds I realize that I would directly need the plant already grown.
To smoke it.
Day 58
Quarantine Journal
11.05.20
Dude wants to know by our chat what I wanted to say by his face. Not that is gonna make much difference, I’m very good at communicating emotions either by being silent in person, as well as by not answering messages in chat. Elusion, a great talent that also my crush has.
I talk, he answers: everything was more clear when everything was more messed up.
I don’t know, I don’t understand.
My friend S. and I go for a walk on the beach for our hour of freedom. We sit in front of the shore, as the sunset falls behind the sea and the boats start shimmering on the invisible line of the horizon. Distant but close, visible but far.
‘Surreal. Probably they look so beautiful because we cannot reach them.’
Day 61
Quarantine Journal
14.05.20
I think I need to annul myself for few hours, just for a little, so perhaps also the pain will be annulled.
The pain of laying the bloody washing machines on the bloody rooftop, when then, after 10 bloody minutes, the bloody storm arrives.
The pain that what is not arriving are answers.
Day 65
Quarantine Journal
18.05.20
Stuck in front of the iMac to develop my project, to let myself be absorbed by my project, to leave no room for thoughts other than those dedicated to my project.
L. became depressed because he is idling around.
D. cleans the kitchen but doesn’t finish it.
Day 69
Quarantine Journal
22.05.20
I’m going out because it’s Friday. On Friday night we hang out. On Fridays night we used to hang out.
Second official meeting after the quarantine, we go to La Linea winery. While I’m walking to reach my friends a lady insults me because I’m not wearing the mask. Around Europe if you people shout you ‘murderer’ from the window.
At the usual winery, drinking the usual copas de vino blanco. The only thing that is not the usual is the taste of the routines, which even if they are the same, have a different flavour. We have just uncorked the bottle when the owner reach us saying that if we don’t eat we have to leave, that he has 8 more reservations for eat and if he doesn’t invoice he fails, that he needs those 8 reservations for eat, that he has to take the bottle away but he offers us the glasses of wine. He just begs to leave that table.
We go to another place. My friend S. asks for the olives: 'before the lockdown you always used to bring them'.
Before the lockdown the routine had a different flavour. Of olives.
Now is just bitter.
Day 73
Quarantine Journal
26.05.20
I officially confirm the flat, and tell my manager that I will be working from Tarifa during the next month.
I take out from the wardrobe the backpack I put in after Iceland and before the quarantine, 2 hours before the quarantine, those 2 hours where I thought I had the chance to see him: crush.
Rush: I had never packed my backpack in such a hurry and so in advance before a trip, but I had never packed my backpack during a lockdown either. A lockdown where the Spanish borders remains closed but we are finally allowed to move between municipalities.
Day 77
Quarantine Journal
30.05.20
Late for check-in in the new flat because I am still stuck in the old one, chatting with my friend in Spain about my moving, during a lockdown that makes every small change look enormous, and every distance insurmountable.
I leave the flat-space that I abused during the quarantine, and I no longer leave the gap-space for guilty feeling to abuse me. I close the laptop and I take my taxi to Tarifa.
From the Spanish coast I see the Moroccan one. I start to breathe and feeling a little lighter. The Levante blows and moves the grain fields under the golden sun, golden waves. The Levante blows into the new flat and moves me.
Day 82
Quarantine Journal
04.06.20
Knowing is good but not knowing is better. If they had told me in advance that the path for arrive to understand yourself and feel good was so difficult, and painful, and requiring so much effort, I would have continued to feel bad.
Call with mum. Bad news from home. The vet says our dog has probably only one year left to live. A year to live while I’m stuck wasting my time here, paying the price for my freedom.
And Tarifa’s Airbnb.
Day 86
Quarantine Journal
08.06.20
Dude is inside a bar.
I see him, sitting in front of the window. He sees me, walking down the street. We look at each other, I look away, I look at him again, he disappears. He appears again. He gets up, leaves the bar, crosses the street, comes towards me, looks at me, I look at him, I kiss him. We separate, he kisses me.
I wake up.
I look for a skirt in the colours of my trip, so I can surround myself again with the sensations I felt when I watched the full moon melt into darkness, hoping that maybe will melt in the night also my feelings for him.
Day 91
Quarantine Journal
13.06.20
I dreamt of the sea.It was transparent, shallow, calm. I am in the sea, immersed in the shimmering water, when from the flat ocean a roar breaks the silence, a wave grows, rises, ripples, and the tsunami hits the shore.
I go walking, I get lost, I find myself again.
Day 95
Quarantine Journal
17.06.20
In the end it’s all about searching and finding the connection. When they finally replace the router.
From the internet – in WiFi: ‘And what is the name of this virus?’ ‘They call it love.’
Btw: No Amazon guy has been seized.
Day 100
Quarantine Journal
22.06.20
I needed silence to listen my thoughts. I needed space to let go all the old things and to let in the new ones.
The lockdown keeps haunting me with all the things I should have done in the past, but it has stopped distressing me with the things I would like to do in the future.
Everything is clear and under control.
The clarity for face the meeting with my manager and formalise the relocation request to New York. The clarity in reading the news that Trump has been quicker than me to formalise his request, issuing an executive order suspending the working visas for the US. The clarity in seeing my relocation request going to shit.
The clarity in laughing out of control because it’s obvious that also the karma is laughing with me. At me.
Day 104
Quarantine Journal
26.06.20
I can finally get undressed at night. Only because during the day I have to pretend I’m not naked all the time.
Day 109
Quarantine Journal
01.07.20
I don’t sleep, I have a cold, I stay offline from the office.
I stay in bed until lunchtime.
I stay in bed all day, but it’s not enough.
This bed somehow reminds me dude, when I was falling asleep waiting for his messages, and when I was waking up finding them. He would arrive at night, like the nightmares where you go deep down, and the dreams where you fly high.
Friday, at the airport.
-2
Third month
Day 02
Quarantine Journal
16.03.20
Today day of celebrations: an endless motorbike roadtrip from Morocco for D., and the Spain relocation anniversary for me. Shots of Vodka and Slivovice and my flatmate D. is now back home safe. Shots of Vodka and Slivovice and my flatmate D. is now back home drunk.
Flatmate L. and me, had already realized that drinking would have become a problem the first night, when we collapsed on the sofa watching zombie apocalypse movies very sober – vida es movimiento cit.
Side effect quarantine 01: alcohol.
Day 06
Quarantine Journal
20.03.20
I work remotely with the iMac that my manager was able to bringing me from the Gibraltar office. With the iMac and the job we make a lot of calls, and on Friday after the end we make the alcoholic ones.
The side effect of quarantine number 03 is less self-control, which is a perfect combination with the alcoholic one. I chat to my crush: ‘I miss you. Quarantine sucks. Take care.’ What he never misses are the words: ‘Yeah. I’m so pissed.’
To cheer us up, my flatmates and me play poker. So in addition to my dignity, I also lose my money.
Day 10
Quarantine Journal
24.03.20
Cleaning the fridge is important. Especially when you find out that the virus has actually developed inside your kitchen.
I eat another whole bar of chocolate while working until 3 a.m. on an urgent office project. I am grateful to have this urgent project which although it deprives me of sleep, also deprives me of the time to realise that I am in prison.
In the meantime, while I do a 3-day job in 1-night, L. entertains me drunk by practicing his skills for become a stand-up comedian. A show of hours. A show of talent. At midnight, my manager: ‘Can we jump on a quick call? Or your housemates are sleeping?’
Day 14
Quarantine Journal
28.03.20
Call with my person. Isolated in his flat in Milan. Both not sleeping, both trying to maintain control in uncontrollable circumstances: ‘my neck is broken, not even after an evening of blowjobs.’
Not even after an evening of wild sex, which during a pandemic is forbidden.
Enchanted by the Saturday sunset fall, I spend the Saturday night lying in the new living room, twisted on the sofa watching Nocturnal Animal, fascinated by the candlelight, noir, oil and red, and the question ‘do you ever feel you life has turned into something you never intended?
Day 18
Quarantine Journal
01.04.20
I think it happened in the last few days that I started dressing again. Not in the sense that I was going around the flat naked to entertain the guys, but in the sense that I stopped wearing pajamas all day and start to put on again trousers, sometimes kimonos, to cheer myself up a bit.
The earrings were the first to appear again. Not the pearls from every day, but the Saturday afternoon mood headbands. The obsession by earrings, to prove that as you get older you become like your mother.
Queen’s ornaments.
Corona’s ornaments.
Day 22
Quarantine Journal
05.04.20
One of the most irritating days of quarantine, so far. A lazy one, a day to spend lying down the sofa all afternoon, between the pillows watching Friends.
Video call with my friends from Italy, they’re collapsing. Text chat with my friend in Spain, he suffers our separation. We discuss, because I wanted a separation from people even before the lockdown. Leave me alone, leave me to my social distancing, leave me to my safe space.
I suffer the containment and cook gnocchi for cheer myself up. What really cheers me up and have a laugh is him. Always. I am so fucked up. But gnocchi are delicious.
Day 26
Quarantine Journal
09.04.20
I try to remain positive and optimistic for avoid to kill the neighbours, because quarantined people yelling all day long outside the windows is the worst part of the confinement.
The side effect number 04 is that patience is gone. Earphones and music are saving my sanity, though not my hearing. Mood swings. And seagulls croaking, less than the neighbours anyway.
Day 30
Quarantine Journal
13.04.20
The smell of the past that we got rid of comes back from the toilet.
I spend the whole day going through, every, single, picture, from my photographic archive, seeing the things I couldn’t look at before. Has always been a problem of space. Empty spaces to fill, trying and failing, and sometimes with things that weren’t really necessary, until I realised that ‘my life has turned into something I never intended’ and I left to build the life I wanted.
Day 34
Quarantine Journal
17.04.20
The extension is official.
I miss the air.
Equally official is the decision I made today, and this quarantine will not win over me, it will not deprive me of life, of hope, of my time; and the time I have at my disposal, despite this strange form, will be use in the best possible way. Because I am a warrior and I’ll win this battle.
This bottle.
And anyway I have a home, a job, and I remain a privileged ass who complains about everything when it lacks nothing.
Day 38
Quarantine Journal
21.04.20
I start to train on the terrace, for real. From the chat with my person.
‘Baby, I just ran for 10 min. From here to the hip prosthesis, only the last stumble is missing.’
‘Total rehab, diet, no wine, and as few cigarettes as possible. From here to the next nervous breakdown, only the lack of sleep is missing.’
L. invited his crush at home today. He cleaned, threw out the rubbish, cooked, he was very nervous. I wonder if my crush would has the same reaction.
‘This week.’
In Italy people sing outside the windows. Singing dulls the fear. The voice out makes you free, art makes you free. Every form of expression makes you free. Every form of expression is art.
Art is relief.
Day 42
Quarantine Journal
25.04.20
The days of this quarantine are made of the things that do not happen.
From what did not happen yesterday I understand that the line from being very sensitive to being very disturbed is thin.
In the end, what happened yesterday is that flatmate L. has been bring through the whole colorful rainbow of my emotions, and while we were drinking beer on the terrace, we concluded that the absolute value has to be the truth ‘speak, write, express what you feel’, L. said.
‘Unexpressed emotions will never die’, the internet said.
So, in the end, what happened is that I spent the whole day immobile on the sofa. Only to forget that yesterday, to express what I feel my emotions, and my truths, I send to my crush a picture of a duck and an ugly song, while to express himself he replies ‘kawaii’.
Day 46
Quarantine Journal
29.04.20
I fall asleep at 5 a.m. I fall asleep at 5 a.m. because I’m too pissed off and too exhausted for sleep. I wake up even more pissed off than I was the night before, and the situation gets even worst when I realise that someone has used my mug and I have to drink my coffee on another one, which is also horribly ugly.
The day flows between stupid questions, annoying noises and voices, the shitty and too loud music of the neighbours, and Sanchez who will reopen the borders only in July.
That’s how are increasing both the anger and the tension of being stuck with no way out, towards a future that we don’t know, because everything is closed: us, the borders, the opportunities, the smiles behind the masks.
There, even those are confined.
Day 50
Quarantine Journal
03.05.20
At the top of the mountain I went for real, but to retrace the trip I had with D. before the quarantine. I immerce myself in a field of flowers same as the one on ‘The colour purple’.
I wore the shoes I broke yesterday, so I also broke my feet, and now I feel like Frodo Baggins dragging himself through the torrid rocks of Mordor carrying the weight of his burdens.
Waiting for me at home there is a text with dude’s music, I send him my photos thinking that song expresses what seems impossible to say.
I guess then, what is possible to do, is plant more weed.
Day 54
Quarantine Journal
07.05.20
Video aperitif call with M. (which stands for A.’s surname, who wants his name to appear instead, but for me he remains M. and I won’t call him by name).
We talk about ideas, projects to think and business model canvas to do. We talk about quarantine, mine in Spain, his in Milan.
‘Eh, but what do you want to do with it T.? You let it be, even when my father, a man all rigid and controlling, had surgery and took morphine, I asked him if he was going to get the bump, he said: ‘Eh, but what do you want to do with it M., in certain moments is not on you anymore, you can only put yourself in someone else’s hands and let it be’.
In the meanwhile D. ambushed me in the living room, as besides the plants he has pruned the beard that he has been growing for 4 years.
Side effect of quarantine number 08: creative hairstyles
Day 59
Quarantine Journal
12.05.20
Sometimes I feel like I communicate badly. I call my brilliant friend P. to tell him about my projects, and communicate funnily.
‘I don’t know P. I feel emptied. I feel that I need some space and I wonder what can give me back the energy after all of this.’
‘After all of this, the only thing I’m going to do, is take my motorbike, and run away till I reach the sea.’
‘P. but how are you going to do that? Your girlfriend is terrified from both the virus and the motorbike.’
‘What do you think?! I’m going to reach the sea on my own, not with her!’
The solution is probably this one.
Day 62
Quarantine Journal
15.05.20
My friend S. cames to pick me up by cab. I’ve my make-up and my outfit on, it’s Friday night, and we hang out.
First official meeting after the quarantine, we go in Alcaidesa to celebrate the birthday of my friend here in Spain.
Dude doesn't join us, obviously.
Thankfully, as I feel in a middle of a nonsense triangle.
Outside everything looks the same even though everything is different, my way of interacting with people is different, more direct and more impatient, as if the lockdown reminded me that there is no time to lose compromising.
Everything seem resetted. It’s really a restart, but it’s like rebuilding something that has been destroyed, nothing returns as it was.
Day 66
Quarantine Journal
19.05.20
Always stuck in front of the iMac to develop my project.
L. always depressed because he idles around.
D. always cleaning the kitchen, but finishing it.
The air smells jasmine. The fragrance of summer, the fragrance of lightness. The fragrance of freedom, in the time of lockdown. The fragrance of love, in the time of Corona.
This night I dreamt that I was running, trying to reach my plane for don’t miss it, I was late, I was rushing, it was a race against time, a rage against time. I wake up.
I will never find out if I reach or I lost that plane.
Day 70
Quarantine Journal
23.05.20
It’s also bitter the hungover the day after, that even though I spent the entire first month of quarantine drinking on the sofa in the living room and I should be trained, it seems that no matter what, if I drink out the night before, then the day after I can die inside.
I go to the shelter to looking for the cat. The cat is not there, but the volunteer explains me that if he has an ear cut off is probably because is a street cat, and when they find them on the streets tehy got spade, and that is the mark the vet makes for recognise them.
Abuses.
D. finds another kitten who is looking for a house, and in a month will find ours. My crush finds me in the hallucination of the chat, while I am eating vegetables in front of my project, while I am trying to distract myself from the awareness that I am waiting for him to do something, because I am too scared for do anything.
Day 74
Quarantine Journal
27.05.20
I’ve been laughing all afternoon. If these two thought that I was going to Tarifa without leaving them with a nice memory, they were wrong.
I turn off the toilet light, is more effective with the darkness. I place a snake (+3 anos) in the bathroom, between the toilet and the bidet, a bit hidden but quite visible. Not visible for them apparently. At 10 p.m. from the bathroom L. jumps and sends us to hell, saying that we are assholes, to fuck off, and that without light it’s not cool at all. If the snake was real we’d all be dead by now.
From the chat with my crush, from a nice thing to read: ‘let go your demons and embrace yourself in the here and now.’
I should have dedicated this to L. when he found the plastic snake on the floor.
Day 78
Quarantine Journal
31.05.20
On the sofa.
It’s difficult to get used to freedom. It’s difficult to get used to all this space. What is very easy instead is to get used to all this silence, without the damn neighbour I had, in the damn La Linea, screaming from the damn windows.
Along with the seagulls.
The beauty of living next to the beach.
I realised how tired I was only when I stopped. At the end the solution was actually this, the one from my brilliant friend P.: to run away, far away, to the sea, alone.
At the end, what I needed after all was just a space and a moment to sit in front of the ocean, and let my thoughts turn into silence.
Life is a wave cit.
Caress the history cit.
Day 79
Quarantine Journal
01.06.20
New routine. I wake up, get out of my tiredness and go running in front of the ocean with the sound of the waves.
Meditating, I think at what my friend M. told me about small habits, the ones that even if you change home or city or state, remain the same. I start to tidy up mine.
Meditating, I try to understand which are the thoughts I don’t want to think about, and the thoughts I don’t want to think at, are the ones related to dramas. Any drama.
Meditating, I felt it, how much I needed this space.
Day 83
Quarantine Journal
05.06.20
The fascination of trying automatic laundries for the first time. The fascination of the automatic laundries that do not wash. The freshness of the automated laundry, not washed by the fascinating automatic laundries but by the summer rainstorm, started the second after I hung my stuff to dry outside.
Anyway, I did the laundry only because this weekend the guys are coming to Tarifa and I’m not going to make L. repeat how much I am stinking.
Tonight I dreamt dude.
I dreamt that was the night of the lockdown, that everyone was running, that we were stuck, that everything was burning, that people were rushing away trying to get to the border, that he was going to save me, that we were going to escape, that he was going to get the car to do it faster. I was waiting him, but the night was never ending. I woke up. I will never find out if he will come back to save me.
Day 87
Quarantine Journal
09.06.20
Tonight I dreamt my lost friend Z. I dreamt that we were meeting again after 10 years, somewhere, around the world, and talk. I dreamt that even though we were different, the way we were communicating was the same.
In the end it’s all about searching for the connection, and finding it. When the router doesn’t work.
From the internet – in 4G – that there is no WiFi: ‘A repressed desire turns into an obsession.’
Day 92
Quarantine Journal
14.06.20
Call with mum while I am having lunch at the beach, to enjoy some physical freedom when the emotional one is still in lockdown.
I protest with her what dude asked me and what I reply in the hallucination of the chat, I protest with her what I should protest with him, realising that I have used too many words with the wrong person and didn't make enough actions.
I retreat to my flat as the transparent, shallow, calm sea retreats before the tsunami, and raise my energy for the last* attempt with dude.
*a/n lol
Day 96
Quarantine Journal
18.06.20
New routines old.
I wake up and meditate. I meditate, and let go my love crush drama. I meditate, and feel good even though I should feel shit.
I run, to the beach.
I run, to buy my ticket for fly back to Italy, for a weekend, as soon as Spain reopens the borders.
Day 101
Quarantine Journal
23.06.20
Reading The girl with the Leica on the beach for lunch. Old routine, new location.
I’m starting to like living by the sea. After a year and a global pandemic of reggaeton, heat, and hungover under the sun.
After a year of fiesta and a quarantine of siesta.
#afflink
Day 105
Quarantine Journal
27.06.20
Last weekend in Tarifa.
My friend S. joins me to celebrate. Dude instead joins me in the hallucination of the chat: ‘I am flying back home this Friday.’
Bon voyage: ‘I am flying back home as well this Friday.’
But dude also says he doesn’t know how long he will stay home. One-way ticket, he says. And like in the nightmare where everyone was running away, everything was burning, and he was disappearing while I was waiting for him in that endless night, whether he would come back or not to save me, I never found out.
My friend S. and I go dancing at night, between the ruins of Tarifa.
My friend S. and I go to fuck two guys, on the beach, between deckchairs and sand in the vagina. Sadness in the vagina.
Day 110
Quarantine Journal
02.07.20
I write, organise Blablacar, download songs and upload them in preparation for tomorrow’s flight. Like before flying to Iceland, and before landing to the lockdown.
I realise that the songs I used to listen more often, now seem new, because they are in that player I only use when I travel by plane. I realise that I haven’t seen a flight since the same time I haven’t seen dude, almost six months. Almost six months of writing to get closer while remaining distant.
Tomorrow, at the airport.
-1
Day 03
Quarantine Journal
17.03.20
Side effect quarantine 02: cigarettes.
Cigarettes are a problem because if you normally smoke, now you smoke more, and if you were already smoking too much, now you have a problem. Even though the real inconvenience is the availability, because if you live in La Linea de la Conception they don’t sell them anywhere, and in Gibraltar you can’t go, because if you cross the border to get in, then they won’t let you out.
Hostage of my home, of Spain, and of my vices, I have to get supplies with contraband. Meanwhile people go crazy and empty the shelves of supermarkets.
Day 07
Quarantine Journal
21.03.20
First week confined home. I have so much unused energy that I woke up at 8 a.m. – on Saturday – and change the geography of the living room. I pretend to travel. Changing the normal order of things changes the energy. Changing the normal order of furniture disorients my flatmates. And the mess I made to move all the stuff wakes them up earlier.
Flatmate L. sings under the shower, L. is happy under the shower because he hasn’t take it for 5 days.
L. cooks for us Mexican food. I look at Inception in the new livingroom and wonder if this is just a bad nightmare.
Day 11
Quarantine Journal
25.03.20
It can’t rain forever. But for a week it can, punctually, the instant after hanging out the laundry on the terrace. Which I had to redone 3 times already, because each time a storm passed over it.
I drain a bottle of red wine to demonstrate the real psychological risks induced by confinement. And the digestive ones when you swallow entire chocolate bars.
At the end what is hanged to drain is my hungover.
Day 15
Quarantine Journal
29.03.20
Divine afternoon in isolation, when you need even more, to stay in touch with friends:
‘How you keeping yourself occupied on this beautiful day of quarantine, dear?’
‘Painting drunk listening Shostakovich.’
Day 19
Quarantine Journal
02.04.20
The only food I can really cook are muffins. Today I burned them, proving how things are starting to turn badly and the situation is getting worrying.
What I’m not burning are the calories, and what’s increasing, apart from the anxiety and the weed plants we’re growing to prepare us for the worst, is the number of deaths and infections.
Reported cases 998,767
Total deads 51,283 Recovered cases 210,191
Day 23
Quarantine Journal
06.04.20
Today is my mother’s birthday. The anger and the sorrow for not being able to be in Italy with my family.
We make a video call to have the illusion of being close. My mum: ‘It’s your fault if there’s a pandemic. It’s the fault of those who travel so much like you, of globalisation. Quarantine is a wonderful form of education.’ At the end is better being far.
To relax a bit I ambush L. again and shoot him with a water gun while he does his nice workouts on the terrace.
Day 27
Quarantine Journal
10.04.20
I believe that quarantine is the punishment we deserve for having created the reality shows 20 years ago.
Pleasure and pain of writing with my crush. The agony of realizing that I fall asleep thinking about him and that I wake up finding his messages.
Today he reminds me how important are the side projects, and I start working on mine again.
Day 31
Quarantine Journal
14.04.20
I’ve eaten so much that I think I’m going to explode. Empty spaces to fill: with food.
To feel a little sexier, a little more womanly – after a week without a hot water showers – I wore a Victorian corset all day long. For the lines, for the poise. For the grace. The grace of what turned out to be such a shitty idea that now my internal organs are so crushed that even my brain is compressed, I have a headache, and I can’t breathe.
Day 35
Quarantine Journal
18.04.20
Day of wild escapades. To buy weed. To visit a friend.
I discovered that quarantine and isolation are resetting the way I relate to people, and that while I was being alone for so long I discovered how to being with others. Mum told me ‘the hug will be an act of trust.’ Yesterday I hugged my friend, and it was beautiful for real.
I got back home beautifuly and awkwardly wandering around, smoothing on the walls of the houses, ducking and tumbling through the palm trees at every twinkle of blue lights and siren song.
The escapade leaves me happy, even though I mostly feel selfish.
Day 39
Quarantine Journal
22.04.20
Dude’s chat wakes me up with the photo of a post-it I left on his laptop before I left for Iceland. Before the pandemic, before the quarantine, before seeing him for the last time.
We’re talking about nightmares. The side effect of quarantine number 06, is that they increased. If the body stands still the imagination moves. The sleep moves, and the mind fills the spaces left empty by the things I’m not doing. They are so so many and deep and lucid, so centred and distressing and too much, that I wake up exhausted in the morning. But with insights, while I am waiting for the dream in which I will fly.
Side effect of quarantine number 07, is the accumulation of Amazon boxes with the stuff that L. and D. keep buying online.
Day 43
Quarantine Journal
26.04.20
After getting crashed on the sofa yesterday, today I feel awake.
Sunday routine. I paint, and I reflect on the philosophy of getting naked. The virtue of nudity is that is pure honesty. There is nothing you can hide anymore, and after you undressed yourself, only the true things remain. Who the hell is getting naked now?
I paint, myself. The body is art. Art is love. I also start painting things that make sense. Not only with my ass, also with brushes.
Day 47
Quarantine Journal
30.04.20
I fall asleep at 5 a.m. Again. I write and smear sheets.
Smell shit.
This quarantine haunts me with all the things I should have done in the past, and anguishes me with all the things I wanted to do in the future. All those projects that now fade in front of me dissolved to uncertanties. What I would have done if I knew I was running out of time?
I think that my crush was born at the end of the year, that he begins when everything ends, that he arrives before it’s too late.
Day 51
Quarantine Journal
04.05.20
I dream of a golden, transparent sea, where slowly, a wave of dense, ineluctable black spreads, enlarging over the honey and the sweetness of the water.
At home, I write and smear sheets, I write and smell shit.
The shit I was smelling is that I find myself, my crush and one of of our friend in a love triangle: my friend has feeling for me, I have felling for dude, and dude noone knows.
This time I force myself to face everything without escaping. This time I decide that the moment to have serious confrontations has really arrived. The moment to face my cleaning shift has come. As if there is any way I can escape from it. Quarantined, exiled, with closed borders.
Day 55
Quarantine Journal
08.05.20
I keep archiving photos from my past and I understand that I’m ready to live in the present, which is unfortunately in lockdown, as has become the chat with dude, as expected.
Agonising over this tormented love drama I call my person to talk:
‘All this happens because you have the awkward and detached approach of a man and use the weapons of seduction of a beast. When do you think you will begin to become a woman?’
At the end is better to stay silent.
Side effect of quarantine number 07 for L. who bought on Amazon quintals of hats of which maybe one fits.
Day 60
Quarantine Journal
13.05.20
I dreamt that I was on the beach. The sunset falling behind the sea, while I walked along the shore, surrounded by the water, with the tide rising, with the waves growing and coming towards me, while I was staying on the shore watching them submerge me.
The sea was pink.
D. and I plant sunflowers.
Day 63
Quarantine Journal
16.05.20
Record-breaking call with my person: 5 hours and 30 minutes while I try to survive the hungover on my sofa in Spain, and while he glazes the silver in his flat in Italy. We comment ‘The Girl on the Train’ and talk about abuses.
Record-breaking walk to the top of the mountain for look at the things from above. Again.
Record-breaking cry because I actually saw all those things from above, all the abuses suffered and all the abuses inflicted.
I find a cat, who seems terrified and meowing follows me from afar. I was trying to go closer for cuddle him, when the lamppost lights up his severed ear and his dirty face. I stay there trying to convince him to come home with me, but I am unable to bring him to safety.
The sprouts are born from the seeds that D. and I planted.
Sugar baby.
Day 67
Quarantine Journal
20.05.20
Today I tell the guys that I’m moving to Tarifa, for a month.
Today L. tells us that he is moving to another flat, forever.
D. almost faints but at the end he takes it well, the beer from the fridge. I take the pizza from the freezer, as eventually the cure for everything is to eat and drink together.
Day 71
Quarantine Journal
24.05.20
Afternoon coffee with my friend M., one of those who took fitness in quarantine seriously. She shows me the house she is building, telling me about her projects and reminding me how important are even the smallest routines, the ones that also if you change house, or city, or state, always remain the same.
Evening walk with flatmate L., me in search of my frightened cat, him in search of the stray dog he fell in love with, all of us in search of hope. We find the cat, we don’t find the dog, we lose everything when we can’t bring the beast to safety.
Day 75
Quarantine Journal
28.05.20
My friend S. says that into the cat I am projecting something else. Someone else.
I go back to try one last time to bring him to safety. I watch him hiding because I was scaring him, and at the same time approaching me because he wanted to be cuddled. I try to convince him to enter the prison of the carrier, but I couldn’t force him.
I leave the cat in his shelter and I go back to mine, realising that I value freedom more than safety.
Day 80
Quarantine Journal
02.06.20
Standard routine. Call with my antique person from my nouveau terrace.
Both Desperados but both motivated. We talk about how often we feel as 2 unlucky craps, when in reality we are just 2 privileged lazy asses with the time to complain about our little problems, just because we already have everything we need in order to survive.
Day 84
Quarantine Journal
06.06.20
Flat squad in Tarifa.
Flat squad tripping in Tarifa.
We meet under the sun on the beach, and get lost under the reflection of the full moon, rising and melting in the night, liquids, deep oil, white light. We find ourselves with much more than we had before: body, mind, and spirit cit.
I laughed so hard that my jaw hurts. We emerged from that beach as if we had survived a shipwreck. That’s certainly what they thought at the chiringuito where we landed before returning home to fall asleep on the sofa, with that special confident feeling, trust.
Gratitude. Intimacy.
Day 88
Quarantine Journal
10.06.20
New routines old. I wake up and go for a run in front of the ocean. I listen to the waves and meditate. I meditate and also continue not to think about the dramas, continue not to smoke, continue to exercise, and I am sleeping. The side effect of quarantine number 06 – the nightmares – remains, but the insomnia passes.
And anyway, with all this healthy living, jogging I’ve dislocated my knee, working out I’ve pulled my calf, my new shoes have cracked my hips, and I have a twitch in my eyelid.
Everything was better back when everything was worse.
Day 93
Quarantine Journal
15.06.20
From the hallucination of the chat.
My shitty questions.’When can I see you?’
His crappy answers. ‘Can you meet me on the new chat tool?’
And the tsunami of the toilet flush where my feelings for him can go.
Day 97
Quarantine Journal
19.06.20
My manager calls me saying that there is an important presentation this afternoon, and he would be happy if I could make it.
My manager is amazing, the opportunity is amazing, the presentation is amazing, but the most amazing thing of all, is how I care more about making the banana split than all of this. I realise that the moment is really coming.
Day 98
Quarantine Journal
20.06.20
The sea is transparent, shallow, calm. My friend M. comes to visit me in Tarifa. On the beach, we talk.
‘You know, I always used to ask myself – why? – Why did he do this, why did she reply that, and so on. I thought that was helping me to understand the person in front of me. But you know what? You cannot force a connection. Or there is, or there isn’t. And darling, another thing I can assure you about, if a person wants to see you, will find a way.’
My friend M. is reading a book ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself’ so she tries out some of my routines and I try out some of hers.
#afflink
Day 102
Quarantine Journal
24.06.20
1.5 hour meeting to explain the re-entry plan in the Gibraltar office. Return that nobody wants. Just like I don’t want to return to my old flat in La Linea.
The lockdown keeps haunting me with all the things I should have done in the past, and now Trump is haunting me with all the things I wanted to do in the future. But that clown won’t win, and even though maybe it’s not time for me to move to New York, maybe it’s time for me to do something else. To care about something and someone other than myself, helping those who by this pandemic are suffering the most.
Mine: WFP Yemen, Unicef Yemen, Médecins Sans Frontieres
Day 106
Quarantine Journal
28.06.20
I got my period: thank goodness.
I got an idea: buy the flat in Tarifa.
I am going back to La Linea and I am happy to return to La Linea. I am happy to go back because I feel ready to face what I had put on hold and temporarily left behind. I am happy to be back because I am curious to find out which new things are waiting for me.
I missed what I had here, I am happy, and I am serene.
Day 111
Quarantine Journal
03.07.20
I don’t sleep the whole night, because it’s too hot, too itchy, too noisy, with too many seagulls.
The truth is that I don’t sleep the whole night because I’m too excited for my flight, for dude’s flight.
Blablacar, almost there. Airport, empty. I am running and speeding, it’s a countdown.
’Hi dude, I’m having an adrenaline rush because of our flights and are finally free.’ I am running and speeding, it’s almost the moment.
‘Where are you? I am at gate D63.’ The heart is beating faster, the moment is now.
When the plane takes off I feel the same emotion I felt when I moved abroad the first time. With the heart expanding, I realise that what I was missing was exactly this – vida es movimiento cit. I understand that the only way to be sure of not missing any opportunity is to take them all, and I understand that the way I want to live my life is exactly this, happy. And at the airport, even if sometimes it’s the wrong one.
Song of the day: I’ll fly with you (but from a different plane, from a different airport)
Travel quote: catch flights, not feelings
Third
month
Day 00
Quarantine Journal
14.03.20
I land at Gibraltar airport in the morning, people around are wearing masks, people on the way out are asking questions:
‘when was the last time you went back to Italy?’
‘At Christmas.’ I hear my mother’s disapproval for have let pass 3 months already.
‘From which airport are you arriving?’
‘From Reykiavik.’
‘All good, welcome!’
Welcome to my ass. Spain declares the state of emergency and goes into lockdown 2 hours later, with the police already on the street sending people back into their houses. Too late for escape this time.
My flatmate L., a claustrophobic attack, and me, toast to the 15 days of quarantine that await us with the Corona, since there’s plenty around.
Day 02
Quarantine Journal
16.03.20
Today day of celebrations: an endless motorbike roadtrip from Morocco for D., and the Spain relocation anniversary for me. Shots of Vodka and Slivovice and my flatmate D. is now back home safe. Shots of Vodka and Slivovice and my flatmate D. is now back home drunk.
Flatmate L. and me, had already realized that drinking would have become a problem the first night, when we collapsed on the sofa watching zombie apocalypse movies very sober – vida es movimiento cit.
Side effect quarantine 01: alcohol.
Day 04
Quarantine Journal
18.03.20
I think that boredom will turn me crazy. With gloves and broomstick I buid a trap to scare flatmate L. by beating his window in the middle of the night.
I send to my crush the video of the broom ambush to L. and after he wanders if any drug has been taken. My crush is very sharp because my flatmate already took them an hour ago, and now he sees things at the shadows of the chandelier.
I’m taking a bath. Along with my phone, which drowns and dies. And there’s the lockdown. And there’s no shops open to fix it. Isolation 4.0.
Day 06
Quarantine Journal
20.03.20
I work remotely with the iMac that my manager was able to bringing me from the Gibraltar office. With the iMac and the job we make a lot of calls, and on Friday after the end we make the alcoholic ones.
The side effect of quarantine number 03 is less self-control, which is a perfect combination with the alcoholic one. I chat to my crush: ‘I miss you. Quarantine sucks. Take care.’ What he never misses are the words: ‘Yeah. I’m so pissed.’
To cheer us up, my flatmates and me play poker. So in addition to my dignity, I also lose my money.
Day 09
Quarantine Journal
23.03.20
Washing yourself is important. Especially after flatmate L. – who has not washed himself for 5 days – tells me that I stink. I understand that the fateful moment to take a bath has arrived: I wash myself. And my conscience for had eaten a whole bar of chocolate. In any case I don’t believe that people in quarantine, shut at home are always perfumed.
Flatmate D. smiles happily. One of the benefits of microdosing.
Day 11
Quarantine Journal
25.03.20
It can’t rain forever. But for a week it can, punctually, the instant after hanging out the laundry on the terrace. Which I had to redone 3 times already, because each time a storm passed over it.
I drain a bottle of red wine to demonstrate the real psychological risks induced by confinement. And the digestive ones when you swallow entire chocolate bars.
At the end what is hanged to drain is my hungover.
Day 13
Quarantine Journal
27.03.20
I think I’ve swallowed 4,000 kcal. Flatmate D. bought the masks. At this stage of things, probably not for go out. We are more at risk of infection staying at home, between these walls, with these floors, in the stench of the showers than we don’t take.
Tonight, at midnight, there was an ambulance on the street in front of my building. A lady was taken to the hospital, a lady who doesn’t know if she will be take home after.
Day 15
Quarantine Journal
29.03.20
Divine afternoon in isolation, when you need even more, to stay in touch with friends:
‘How you keeping yourself occupied on this beautiful day of quarantine, dear?’
‘Painting drunk listening Shostakovich.’
Day 17
Quarantine Journal
31.03.20
L. cooks vegetables, I cook pizza, my crush cooks me: ‘so when can I come to eat that pizza?’ We cook each other between flatmates: ‘would you feel uncomfortable with the infection if I meet a friend?’ ‘Man or woman?’ ‘Man’ ‘Why? We are not enough for you?’ Enough to believe.
The ultimate expression of freedom is to deprive yourself of your own by fighting for the freedom of all, caring more about other people’s health than our own, mental health. It looks like I will eat that pizza by myself without the dude.
Day 19
Quarantine Journal
02.04.20
The only food I can really cook are muffins. Today I burned them, proving how things are starting to turn badly and the situation is getting worrying.
What I’m not burning are the calories, and what’s increasing, apart from the anxiety and the weed plants we’re growing to prepare us for the worst, is the number of deaths and infections.
Reported cases 998,767
Total deads 51,283 Recovered cases 210,191
Day 21
Quarantine Journal
04.04.20
When mum told me ‘the soil is fertile for the fragilities to come out’, I was thinking more about the difficulties related to the cultivation of weed rather than those related to the cultivation of the inner self.
Anyway, it seems that with physical containment you free your expression. As if not being able to move, require to balance by talking. With my crush. Unbelievable, but it seems that being physically blocked overcomes one’s emotional limitations.
L. has no intentions of being physically contained and starts doing regular workouts on the terrace, and runs, and meditates.
The only workout that D. and I do is the alcoholic one.
Day 22
Quarantine Journal
05.04.20
One of the most irritating days of quarantine, so far. A lazy one, a day to spend lying down the sofa all afternoon, between the pillows watching Friends.
Video call with my friends from Italy, they’re collapsing. Text chat with my friend in Spain, he suffers our separation. We discuss, because I wanted a separation from people even before the lockdown. Leave me alone, leave me to my social distancing, leave me to my safe space.
I suffer the containment and cook gnocchi for cheer myself up. What really cheers me up and have a laugh is him. Always. I am so fucked up. But gnocchi are delicious.
Day 24
Quarantine Journal
07.04.20
Flatmate L. goes vegan.
His decision and the effort he’s investing for not waste the time of this quarantine, first makes me feel idle, lazy and boring, then inspires me. I resume my workouts. The fact that I smoke like a chimney doesn’t help me finish them though. I am out of breath, I can’t breathe. Even worse than the claustrophobia attack of Day 01.
I break all the cigarettes I have left and decide to stop smoking.
Day 27
Quarantine Journal
10.04.20
I believe that quarantine is the punishment we deserve for having created the reality shows 20 years ago.
Pleasure and pain of writing with my crush. The agony of realizing that I fall asleep thinking about him and that I wake up finding his messages.
Today he reminds me how important are the side projects, and I start working on mine again.
Day 29
Quarantine Journal
12.04.20
Mood of the day: pain. Pain for the evil we are doing to nature. I saw the plastic gloves in front of the supermarket floating as the plastic bag in ‘American Beauty’ was floating in the air. On the void.
I watch ‘The Colour Purple’, I cried, I send the movie to the dude while he was sending me his songs. This quarantine creates strange connections.
Day 31
Quarantine Journal
14.04.20
I’ve eaten so much that I think I’m going to explode. Empty spaces to fill: with food.
To feel a little sexier, a little more womanly – after a week without a hot water showers – I wore a Victorian corset all day long. For the lines, for the poise. For the grace. The grace of what turned out to be such a shitty idea that now my internal organs are so crushed that even my brain is compressed, I have a headache, and I can’t breathe.
Day 33
Quarantine Journal
16.04.20
The stomach acidity last night was improved by drinking a whole bottle of strawberry wine, paying for its sweet and fruity consequences throughout the morning, until 7 p.m..
Unfortunately, however, not even the hungover can distract me from the news of a possible new lockdown extension. Until May 11th. I miss the air. I miss my life. I miss my friends. I miss him. I wonder what we all find at the end of all of this.
L. cooks burritos. Probably to be forgiven that after suggesting that all of us should have stay stuck in the flat, he is now totally in the grip of his love affair. After sabotaging mine.
Day 35
Quarantine Journal
18.04.20
Day of wild escapades. To buy weed. To visit a friend.
I discovered that quarantine and isolation are resetting the way I relate to people, and that while I was being alone for so long I discovered how to being with others. Mum told me ‘the hug will be an act of trust.’ Yesterday I hugged my friend, and it was beautiful for real.
I got back home beautifuly and awkwardly wandering around, smoothing on the walls of the houses, ducking and tumbling through the palm trees at every twinkle of blue lights and siren song.
The escapade leaves me happy, even though I mostly feel selfish.
Day 37
Quarantine Journal
20.04.20
From the chat with my person, always in quarantine in his flat in Milan, while I am trapped on my rooftop at La Linea.
‘What’s the sexiest, doing?’
‘I’m stuck in the operation – open the wardrobe and throw out anything that doesn’t give you joy.’
‘That’s a dangerous game:
A) because we’re not joyful people;
B) right now nothing gives joy;
C) start eliminating the most flammable rags and try another method. Throw anything that would embarrass you if you had an accident, were taken unconscious to the hospital. With the average customer’s shoes.’
‘When I will be taken to the hospital I want to get there without underwear, so even this is a dangerous game.’
Day 40
Quarantine Journal
23.04.20
I paint dissolving clouds and flying beasts waiting for tomorrow. ‘This week.’
Video call with my friend and former flatmate quarantined in Lisbon: ‘I was pressing the space bar to pause you. Here’s how my quarantine is going.’
Day 41
Quarantine Journal
24.04.20
Yellow water comes out of the sinks. Seal of the apocalypse.
During the night I dream when I was living in Milan. During the day I dream that my crush tells me when we can meet. It doesn’t happen. Too many expectations, too many hopes, too many illusions. Too much involvement. Everything is too much, and the worst side effect of this quarantine is that everything is amplified, that nothing can be kept under control and that every weakness becomes unbearable.
I escape between the rocks for watch the sea. Too much salt water in front the eyes.
Day 43
Quarantine Journal
26.04.20
After getting crashed on the sofa yesterday, today I feel awake.
Sunday routine. I paint, and I reflect on the philosophy of getting naked. The virtue of nudity is that is pure honesty. There is nothing you can hide anymore, and after you undressed yourself, only the true things remain. Who the hell is getting naked now?
I paint, myself. The body is art. Art is love. I also start painting things that make sense. Not only with my ass, also with brushes.
Day 45
Quarantine Journal
28.04.20
Bank holiday. Today D. with all his seraphic being, officially summoned a flat meeting to announce that the time to wash the dishes and keep the sink clean, has come.
Today the rules of flat-sharing, that until now had been breakfast at 3 p.m. and dinner at wine, are established.
I run to visit my friend S. for spend the afternoon light and tipsy under the sun on the terrace, pretending to be free.
I return home and eat canned anchovies over the clean sink. I’m already drinking directly from the milk carton, I can’t remember since how long.
I’m really an adult, a man adult.
Day 47
Quarantine Journal
30.04.20
I fall asleep at 5 a.m. Again. I write and smear sheets.
Smell shit.
This quarantine haunts me with all the things I should have done in the past, and anguishes me with all the things I wanted to do in the future. All those projects that now fade in front of me dissolved to uncertanties. What I would have done if I knew I was running out of time?
I think that my crush was born at the end of the year, that he begins when everything ends, that he arrives before it’s too late.
Day 49
Quarantine Journal
02.05.20
On call with my person. He is invited to do his first professional talk. His first histrionic professional talk.
I take a run on the terrace and destroy my shoes. My person suggests me to take a French 75 and let someone destroy something else. Like Sanchez, who destroy my negative expectations and today he really allow us to go out for walk.
I tell dude, so dude tells me we should meet at the top of the mountain. He jokes because he’s probably not aware that I take seriously everything he says.
Day 51
Quarantine Journal
04.05.20
I dream of a golden, transparent sea, where slowly, a wave of dense, ineluctable black spreads, enlarging over the honey and the sweetness of the water.
At home, I write and smear sheets, I write and smell shit.
The shit I was smelling is that I find myself, my crush and one of of our friend in a love triangle: my friend has feeling for me, I have felling for dude, and dude noone knows.
This time I force myself to face everything without escaping. This time I decide that the moment to have serious confrontations has really arrived. The moment to face my cleaning shift has come. As if there is any way I can escape from it. Quarantined, exiled, with closed borders.
Day 54
Quarantine Journal
07.05.20
Video aperitif call with M. (which stands for A.’s surname, who wants his name to appear instead, but for me he remains M. and I won’t call him by name).
We talk about ideas, projects to think and business model canvas to do. We talk about quarantine, mine in Spain, his in Milan.
‘Eh, but what do you want to do with it T.? You let it be, even when my father, a man all rigid and controlling, had surgery and took morphine, I asked him if he was going to get the bump, he said: ‘Eh, but what do you want to do with it M., in certain moments is not on you anymore, you can only put yourself in someone else’s hands and let it be’.
In the meanwhile D. ambushed me in the living room, as besides the plants he has pruned the beard that he has been growing for 4 years.
Side effect of quarantine number 08: creative hairstyles
Day 55
Quarantine Journal
08.05.20
I keep archiving photos from my past and I understand that I’m ready to live in the present, which is unfortunately in lockdown, as has become the chat with dude, as expected.
Agonising over this tormented love drama I call my person to talk:
‘All this happens because you have the awkward and detached approach of a man and use the weapons of seduction of a beast. When do you think you will begin to become a woman?’
At the end is better to stay silent.
Side effect of quarantine number 07 for L. who bought on Amazon quintals of hats of which maybe one fits.
Day 57
Quarantine Journal
10.05.20
I can’t stop thinking about you. You, who are keeping me awake, while in the middle of the night I am searching for you in the darkness, that even between these dreams and this darkness, my passion for you burns alive and I just can’t stop thinking about you, looking for you, forgetting about you. You, who are there, somewhere and somehow, at the same time and in the same night, waiting for me, looking for me, finding me. You, who are keeping me awake in the middle of another night. You, unstoppable and unforgettable thought. You, mosquito.
I don’t sleep tormented by my obsessions. I go back to the top of the mountain to understand what I should do. I understand it. I go back down and tell the dude I need to talk to him. Not understanding was better.
Day 59
Quarantine Journal
12.05.20
Sometimes I feel like I communicate badly. I call my brilliant friend P. to tell him about my projects, and communicate funnily.
‘I don’t know P. I feel emptied. I feel that I need some space and I wonder what can give me back the energy after all of this.’
‘After all of this, the only thing I’m going to do, is take my motorbike, and run away till I reach the sea.’
‘P. but how are you going to do that? Your girlfriend is terrified from both the virus and the motorbike.’
‘What do you think?! I’m going to reach the sea on my own, not with her!’
The solution is probably this one.
Day 61
Quarantine Journal
14.05.20
I think I need to annul myself for few hours, just for a little, so perhaps also the pain will be annulled.
The pain of laying the bloody washing machines on the bloody rooftop, when then, after 10 bloody minutes, the bloody storm arrives.
The pain that what is not arriving are answers.
Day 63
Quarantine Journal
16.05.20
Record-breaking call with my person: 5 hours and 30 minutes while I try to survive the hungover on my sofa in Spain, and while he glazes the silver in his flat in Italy. We comment ‘The Girl on the Train’ and talk about abuses.
Record-breaking walk to the top of the mountain for look at the things from above. Again.
Record-breaking cry because I actually saw all those things from above, all the abuses suffered and all the abuses inflicted.
I find a cat, who seems terrified and meowing follows me from afar. I was trying to go closer for cuddle him, when the lamppost lights up his severed ear and his dirty face. I stay there trying to convince him to come home with me, but I am unable to bring him to safety.
The sprouts are born from the seeds that D. and I planted.
Sugar baby.
Day 65
Quarantine Journal
18.05.20
Stuck in front of the iMac to develop my project, to let myself be absorbed by my project, to leave no room for thoughts other than those dedicated to my project.
L. became depressed because he is idling around.
D. cleans the kitchen but doesn’t finish it.
Day 67
Quarantine Journal
20.05.20
Today I tell the guys that I’m moving to Tarifa, for a month.
Today L. tells us that he is moving to another flat, forever.
D. almost faints but at the end he takes it well, the beer from the fridge. I take the pizza from the freezer, as eventually the cure for everything is to eat and drink together.
Day 69
Quarantine Journal
22.05.20
I’m going out because it’s Friday. On Friday night we hang out. On Fridays night we used to hang out.
Second official meeting after the quarantine, we go to La Linea winery. While I’m walking to reach my friends a lady insults me because I’m not wearing the mask. Around Europe if you people shout you ‘murderer’ from the window.
At the usual winery, drinking the usual copas de vino blanco. The only thing that is not the usual is the taste of the routines, which even if they are the same, have a different flavour. We have just uncorked the bottle when the owner reach us saying that if we don’t eat we have to leave, that he has 8 more reservations for eat and if he doesn’t invoice he fails, that he needs those 8 reservations for eat, that he has to take the bottle away but he offers us the glasses of wine. He just begs to leave that table.
We go to another place. My friend S. asks for the olives: 'before the lockdown you always used to bring them'.
Before the lockdown the routine had a different flavour. Of olives.
Now is just bitter.
Day 71
Quarantine Journal
24.05.20
Afternoon coffee with my friend M., one of those who took fitness in quarantine seriously. She shows me the house she is building, telling me about her projects and reminding me how important are even the smallest routines, the ones that also if you change house, or city, or state, always remain the same.
Evening walk with flatmate L., me in search of my frightened cat, him in search of the stray dog he fell in love with, all of us in search of hope. We find the cat, we don’t find the dog, we lose everything when we can’t bring the beast to safety.
Day 73
Quarantine Journal
26.05.20
I officially confirm the flat, and tell my manager that I will be working from Tarifa during the next month.
I take out from the wardrobe the backpack I put in after Iceland and before the quarantine, 2 hours before the quarantine, those 2 hours where I thought I had the chance to see him: crush.
Rush: I had never packed my backpack in such a hurry and so in advance before a trip, but I had never packed my backpack during a lockdown either. A lockdown where the Spanish borders remains closed but we are finally allowed to move between municipalities.
Day 76
Quarantine Journal
29.05.20
Saying that escaping from problems is never the solution, and saying that doing so requires a certain amount of resistance to pain for what has being left behind. Saying that there would always be an elegant way to leave.
Well, saying all, I think it’s really time to get the fuck out of here.
The information I am moving in Tarifa finds my friend in Spain in an unfortunate and unexpected way: during a meeting. Not exactly how I was hoping to tell him. With not exactly happy reactions.
I go out for enjoy my last evening in La Linea, needed also to distract myself from the misery of my love life. Speaking of love, while I am totally drunk nicely dancing Macarena in a random place, a guy declares his great love and passion to me.
And now the damn triangle has become a fucking square.
I imagine, at this point, at last, I am forced to admit - especially with myself - that I have a love and passionate crush for dude. Crash.
So, I escape from problems and I escape from love. I think that’s fine with me. Bye bye, adios, hasta la vista, saionara, leave me alone in Tarifa.
Last day with the guys. Last photo with the 3 of us together under this roof.
I love you.
Day 78
Quarantine Journal
31.05.20
On the sofa.
It’s difficult to get used to freedom. It’s difficult to get used to all this space. What is very easy instead is to get used to all this silence, without the damn neighbour I had, in the damn La Linea, screaming from the damn windows.
Along with the seagulls.
The beauty of living next to the beach.
I realised how tired I was only when I stopped. At the end the solution was actually this, the one from my brilliant friend P.: to run away, far away, to the sea, alone.
At the end, what I needed after all was just a space and a moment to sit in front of the ocean, and let my thoughts turn into silence.
Life is a wave cit.
Caress the history cit.
Day 79
Quarantine Journal
01.06.20
New routine. I wake up, get out of my tiredness and go running in front of the ocean with the sound of the waves.
Meditating, I think at what my friend M. told me about small habits, the ones that even if you change home or city or state, remain the same. I start to tidy up mine.
Meditating, I try to understand which are the thoughts I don’t want to think about, and the thoughts I don’t want to think at, are the ones related to dramas. Any drama.
Meditating, I felt it, how much I needed this space.
Day 81
Quarantine Journal
03.06.20
Water. I am running by the ocean and over the lagoon, beside a river with the current flowing in one direction, ahead. I tidy up my thoughts and a sensation arises, that the time of Tarifa won’t be enough, that going back to what I had before does not make me feel serene, and even if I am missing what I had before, what I really feel is that it wasn’t enough. Like this time.
Then I undertand that another time is coming. I submit my job application to Greenpeace.
In Hong Kong.
Day 83
Quarantine Journal
05.06.20
The fascination of trying automatic laundries for the first time. The fascination of the automatic laundries that do not wash. The freshness of the automated laundry, not washed by the fascinating automatic laundries but by the summer rainstorm, started the second after I hung my stuff to dry outside.
Anyway, I did the laundry only because this weekend the guys are coming to Tarifa and I’m not going to make L. repeat how much I am stinking.
Tonight I dreamt dude.
I dreamt that was the night of the lockdown, that everyone was running, that we were stuck, that everything was burning, that people were rushing away trying to get to the border, that he was going to save me, that we were going to escape, that he was going to get the car to do it faster. I was waiting him, but the night was never ending. I woke up. I will never find out if he will come back to save me.
Day 85
Quarantine Journal
07.06.20
Gratitude. Serenity.
The guys go back to La Linea.
I walk, write, and retrace the sensations of the trip that are still all over me. On the way home I buy a new packet of cigarettes. I go on the terrace, light one up, smoke it down. I go to the kitchen, pick the packet up, throw it down in the bin.
D. told me that thinking about the smoke while tripping could work. I stop smoking, and the side effect of quarantine number 02 – the cigarettes – disappears.
Day 87
Quarantine Journal
09.06.20
Tonight I dreamt my lost friend Z. I dreamt that we were meeting again after 10 years, somewhere, around the world, and talk. I dreamt that even though we were different, the way we were communicating was the same.
In the end it’s all about searching for the connection, and finding it. When the router doesn’t work.
From the internet – in 4G – that there is no WiFi: ‘A repressed desire turns into an obsession.’
Day 89
Quarantine Journal
11.06.20
Dude reappears only to ask me if I have moved to Tarifa ‘for good’, as if he could even notice my absence in La Linea.
I’m so nervous about what he does and does not do, about what I did and did not do, and about all the opportunities I’ve screwed up, that I’m choking myself with ice lollies.
Life is made up of small pleasures.
The pleasure of getting fat.
Day 91
Quarantine Journal
13.06.20
I dreamt of the sea.It was transparent, shallow, calm. I am in the sea, immersed in the shimmering water, when from the flat ocean a roar breaks the silence, a wave grows, rises, ripples, and the tsunami hits the shore.
I go walking, I get lost, I find myself again.
Day 93
Quarantine Journal
15.06.20
From the hallucination of the chat.
My shitty questions.’When can I see you?’
His crappy answers. ‘Can you meet me on the new chat tool?’
And the tsunami of the toilet flush where my feelings for him can go.
Day 95
Quarantine Journal
17.06.20
In the end it’s all about searching and finding the connection. When they finally replace the router.
From the internet – in WiFi: ‘And what is the name of this virus?’ ‘They call it love.’
Btw: No Amazon guy has been seized.
Day 97
Quarantine Journal
19.06.20
My manager calls me saying that there is an important presentation this afternoon, and he would be happy if I could make it.
My manager is amazing, the opportunity is amazing, the presentation is amazing, but the most amazing thing of all, is how I care more about making the banana split than all of this. I realise that the moment is really coming.
Day 99
Quarantine Journal
21.06.20
My friend M. slept with natural light, I slept with someone on the bed.
Spain officially reopens its borders. It’s the first day of summer. It’s my first swim of the season in the ocean. My friend M. leaves.
I walk towards the sun falling behind the Andalusian hills, and I feel it. The time has come. The time to do what I was waiting for so long to do. The time has come, to move in New York.
Day 101
Quarantine Journal
23.06.20
Reading The girl with the Leica on the beach for lunch. Old routine, new location.
I’m starting to like living by the sea. After a year and a global pandemic of reggaeton, heat, and hungover under the sun.
After a year of fiesta and a quarantine of siesta.
#afflink
Day 102
Quarantine Journal
24.06.20
1.5 hour meeting to explain the re-entry plan in the Gibraltar office. Return that nobody wants. Just like I don’t want to return to my old flat in La Linea.
The lockdown keeps haunting me with all the things I should have done in the past, and now Trump is haunting me with all the things I wanted to do in the future. But that clown won’t win, and even though maybe it’s not time for me to move to New York, maybe it’s time for me to do something else. To care about something and someone other than myself, helping those who by this pandemic are suffering the most.
Mine: WFP Yemen, Unicef Yemen, Médecins Sans Frontieres
Day 105
Quarantine Journal
27.06.20
Last weekend in Tarifa.
My friend S. joins me to celebrate. Dude instead joins me in the hallucination of the chat: ‘I am flying back home this Friday.’
Bon voyage: ‘I am flying back home as well this Friday.’
But dude also says he doesn’t know how long he will stay home. One-way ticket, he says. And like in the nightmare where everyone was running away, everything was burning, and he was disappearing while I was waiting for him in that endless night, whether he would come back or not to save me, I never found out.
My friend S. and I go dancing at night, between the ruins of Tarifa.
My friend S. and I go to fuck two guys, on the beach, between deckchairs and sand in the vagina. Sadness in the vagina.
Day 107
Quarantine Journal
29.06.20
I don’t sleep, it’s too hot, too noisy, too itchy. The space is not as I need it, the silence is not as I want it, taking a shit makes me feel uncomfortable, and not being able to walk around the flat naked oppresses me.
At least I have a working WiFi, that’s what I was really missing.
I go for a run and try to distract myself, but while I’m running what distracts me are the faces all around, which distract me because I am looking for him.
Friday, at the airport.
Day 110
Quarantine Journal
02.07.20
I write, organise Blablacar, download songs and upload them in preparation for tomorrow’s flight. Like before flying to Iceland, and before landing to the lockdown.
I realise that the songs I used to listen more often, now seem new, because they are in that player I only use when I travel by plane. I realise that I haven’t seen a flight since the same time I haven’t seen dude, almost six months. Almost six months of writing to get closer while remaining distant.
Tomorrow, at the airport.
-1
Day 01
Quarantine Journal
15.03.20
My flatmate L. goes to the office, in Gibraltar. The other one is stuck in Morocco and has already changed his residency on Facebook. I am confined at home, cheering myselft up by calling my Italian friends who have been quarantined since the end of February. They reassure me so much that I have to escape on the rooftop because oh damn I can’t breathe I’m in prison I’m in jail please give me air.
Flatmate L. at 11 p.m. manages to cross the border with Gibraltar, and he reassure me too, reminding me that there is no more toilet paper at home.
A shitty situation.
Day 03
Quarantine Journal
17.03.20
Side effect quarantine 02: cigarettes.
Cigarettes are a problem because if you normally smoke, now you smoke more, and if you were already smoking too much, now you have a problem. Even though the real inconvenience is the availability, because if you live in La Linea de la Conception they don’t sell them anywhere, and in Gibraltar you can’t go, because if you cross the border to get in, then they won’t let you out.
Hostage of my home, of Spain, and of my vices, I have to get supplies with contraband. Meanwhile people go crazy and empty the shelves of supermarkets.
Day 05
Quarantine Journal
19.03.20
While with gloves I build a tool for laughing at L. expences in the middle of a nervous breakdown, around Europe, with the lockdown, the number of infected people is increasing and in the hospitals there wern’t enough gloves and medical devices even before the pandemic.
At home we eat without restraints fearing the starvation. And we cook. Mushrooms. The good ones. Together with pancakes.
Day 07
Quarantine Journal
21.03.20
First week confined home. I have so much unused energy that I woke up at 8 a.m. – on Saturday – and change the geography of the living room. I pretend to travel. Changing the normal order of things changes the energy. Changing the normal order of furniture disorients my flatmates. And the mess I made to move all the stuff wakes them up earlier.
Flatmate L. sings under the shower, L. is happy under the shower because he hasn’t take it for 5 days.
L. cooks for us Mexican food. I look at Inception in the new livingroom and wonder if this is just a bad nightmare.
Day 08
Quarantine Journal
22.03.20
Flatmate D. inflates the doughnut for enjoy the pleasure to have a rooftop at home. D. does yoga, I do stretching, the neighbours do noise. We escape from the rooftop and return to the cell, our flat.
I paint, rediscovering forgotten habits. L. watches other zombie movies rediscovering the fear while I am hiding in the dark corners for terrorise him during the night.
On the bed, in front of a movie: ‘hope you won’t fart’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because my face is positioned in front of your ass.’ ‘Did you fart?’ ‘Didn’t you notice?’
Day 10
Quarantine Journal
24.03.20
Cleaning the fridge is important. Especially when you find out that the virus has actually developed inside your kitchen.
I eat another whole bar of chocolate while working until 3 a.m. on an urgent office project. I am grateful to have this urgent project which although it deprives me of sleep, also deprives me of the time to realise that I am in prison.
In the meantime, while I do a 3-day job in 1-night, L. entertains me drunk by practicing his skills for become a stand-up comedian. A show of hours. A show of talent. At midnight, my manager: ‘Can we jump on a quick call? Or your housemates are sleeping?’
Day 12
Quarantine Journal
26.03.20
I think I smoked 30 cigarettes. The living room is immersed in fog. If I don’t get killed by the virus and the growing madness, the smoke will.
4 hours and 18 minutes on video call with mum: ‘Right now we are all vulnerable. The soil is fertile for the fragilities to come out.’ What makes me fragile now are my own thoughts: I think about all the things I didn’t do when I could, when I was free, when I had the opportunities, and when I wasted them. Then I think no one knows when we will have them again. I can’t breath. Apparently neither my crush can’t, the crush with whom I’ve wasted too many of them.
Day 14
Quarantine Journal
28.03.20
Call with my person. Isolated in his flat in Milan. Both not sleeping, both trying to maintain control in uncontrollable circumstances: ‘my neck is broken, not even after an evening of blowjobs.’
Not even after an evening of wild sex, which during a pandemic is forbidden.
Enchanted by the Saturday sunset fall, I spend the Saturday night lying in the new living room, twisted on the sofa watching Nocturnal Animal, fascinated by the candlelight, noir, oil and red, and the question ‘do you ever feel you life has turned into something you never intended?
Day 16
Quarantine Journal
30.03.20
Quarantine means mood swings. Depression, suffocation, boredom. Energy, joy, creativity, creation. Laugh.
Quarantine means confrontation, with flatmate L.:
‘you know that if you are a man and decide to have the sexual conversion they cut your penis and put what remains of it inside?’
‘Maybe I should try to do the opposite, and become a man.’
Flatemate L. slowly cheews my food.
‘Well, if you decide to become a woman, you should learn how to cook first.’
Quarantine means swing between trash food and healthy smoothies.
Day 18
Quarantine Journal
01.04.20
I think it happened in the last few days that I started dressing again. Not in the sense that I was going around the flat naked to entertain the guys, but in the sense that I stopped wearing pajamas all day and start to put on again trousers, sometimes kimonos, to cheer myself up a bit.
The earrings were the first to appear again. Not the pearls from every day, but the Saturday afternoon mood headbands. The obsession by earrings, to prove that as you get older you become like your mother. Queen’s ornaments. Corona’s ornaments.
Day 20
Quarantine Journal
03.04.20
Today I am told that the quarantine in Spain will last 2 more weeks, at least.
Today I feel bad, because the only thing I want to do is run away, but this time I cannot escape anywhere. And I’m so angry, and I cry so much thinking about the time I wasted because I was afraid, and I miss the past, and the past doesn’t even seem past because nothing is happening and everything seems crystalized the moment before.
I wonder if the life I loved so much will go back to the way it was or if the future is lost.
Day 23
Quarantine Journal
06.04.20
Today is my mother’s birthday. The anger and the sorrow for not being able to be in Italy with my family.
We make a video call to have the illusion of being close. My mum: ‘It’s your fault if there’s a pandemic. It’s the fault of those who travel so much like you, of globalisation. Quarantine is a wonderful form of education.’ At the end is better being far.
To relax a bit I ambush L. again and shoot him with a water gun while he does his nice workouts on the terrace.
Day 25
Quarantine Journal
08.04.20
I keep smoking.
I’m also working, and nothing, at one point I have a flash of inspiration. I escape, yes, from love. A really nice awareness to achieve stuck in quarantine, in the state with the strictest lockdown in Europe, while falling in love with a guy I can’t see. I am so proud of my sense of timing. I also dream, a lot. Not only of not knowing where to go and being lost, but of losing. The trains, the flights, the opportunities.
I try to remain positive and optimistic by perfectioning the pizza recipe: eating makes you happy besides making you fat.
Day 26
Quarantine Journal
09.04.20
I try to remain positive and optimistic for avoid to kill the neighbours, because quarantined people yelling all day long outside the windows is the worst part of the confinement.
The side effect number 04 is that patience is gone. Earphones and music are saving my sanity, though not my hearing. Mood swings. And seagulls croaking, less than the neighbours anyway.
Day 28
Quarantine Journal
11.04.20
28 days later. 28 days later. We are bored and we are boring, I stand in front of the iMac screen and stay there, hypnotized in front of those side projects all day long.
For 28 days every night at 8 o’clock in the evening, all Spain applauds out the windows doctors, nurses, and those who works to save and help everyone.
Day 30
Quarantine Journal
13.04.20
The smell of the past that we got rid of comes back from the toilet.
I spend the whole day going through, every, single, picture, from my photographic archive, seeing the things I couldn’t look at before. Has always been a problem of space. Empty spaces to fill, trying and failing, and sometimes with things that weren’t really necessary, until I realised that ‘my life has turned into something I never intended’ and I left to build the life I wanted.
Day 32
Quarantine Journal
15.04.20
Today L. cleaned the house. I had forgotten the floor has this colour. L. also keeps being vegan, continues his training, do his job, studies, writes his blog, and develops ecommerce.
D. and I drink and smoke. Sometimes we go drinking and smoking at the corner of the sofa, near to the window, near to the freedom.
Meanwhile L. meditates, saying that being seated in that uncomfortable position reactivates the energy, and that doing uncomfortable things in the morning helps to face the challenges during the day. I don’t know, to me the only challenge seems wake up and survive, the stomach acidity.
Day 34
Quarantine Journal
17.04.20
The extension is official.
I miss the air.
Equally official is the decision I made today, and this quarantine will not win over me, it will not deprive me of life, of hope, of my time; and the time I have at my disposal, despite this strange form, will be use in the best possible way. Because I am a warrior and I’ll win this battle.
This bottle.
And anyway I have a home, a job, and I remain a privileged ass who complains about everything when it lacks nothing.
Day 36
Quarantine Journal
19.04.20
Breakfast. I drink the coffee in the kitchen to have a different point of view, L. prepares the smoothies while we talk about reincarnation.
L. would like to reincarnate into an insect or an animal that lives only one day to have different life experiences. I am admired, because I just told him that I would reincarnate in Trump.
Our blender after this statement explodes in front of my face while I’m tasting my delicious coffee.
I just invited myself to my crush’s flat, it seems like I exploded as well. ‘This week’ dude said.
D. and I eat pizza watching ‘The Lord of the Rings’ hoping to find our way in this middle-earth.
Day 38
Quarantine Journal
21.04.20
I start to train on the terrace, for real. From the chat with my person.
‘Baby, I just ran for 10 min. From here to the hip prosthesis, only the last stumble is missing.’
‘Total rehab, diet, no wine, and as few cigarettes as possible. From here to the next nervous breakdown, only the lack of sleep is missing.’
L. invited his crush at home today. He cleaned, threw out the rubbish, cooked, he was very nervous. I wonder if my crush would has the same reaction.
‘This week.’
In Italy people sing outside the windows. Singing dulls the fear. The voice out makes you free, art makes you free. Every form of expression makes you free. Every form of expression is art.
Art is relief.
Day 39
Quarantine Journal
22.04.20
Dude’s chat wakes me up with the photo of a post-it I left on his laptop before I left for Iceland. Before the pandemic, before the quarantine, before seeing him for the last time.
We’re talking about nightmares. The side effect of quarantine number 06, is that they increased. If the body stands still the imagination moves. The sleep moves, and the mind fills the spaces left empty by the things I’m not doing. They are so so many and deep and lucid, so centred and distressing and too much, that I wake up exhausted in the morning. But with insights, while I am waiting for the dream in which I will fly.
Side effect of quarantine number 07, is the accumulation of Amazon boxes with the stuff that L. and D. keep buying online.
Day 42
Quarantine Journal
25.04.20
The days of this quarantine are made of the things that do not happen.
From what did not happen yesterday I understand that the line from being very sensitive to being very disturbed is thin.
In the end, what happened yesterday is that flatmate L. has been bring through the whole colorful rainbow of my emotions, and while we were drinking beer on the terrace, we concluded that the absolute value has to be the truth ‘speak, write, express what you feel’, L. said.
‘Unexpressed emotions will never die’, the internet said.
So, in the end, what happened is that I spent the whole day immobile on the sofa. Only to forget that yesterday, to express what I feel my emotions, and my truths, I send to my crush a picture of a duck and an ugly song, while to express himself he replies ‘kawaii’.
Day 44
Quarantine Journal
27.04.20
I wake up at 7.30 a.m. but I can’t get up. I get up at 10 a.m.
It always takes a long time to find the energy to start the working days during the quarantine. I schedule the cleaning plan but I don’t clean. It always takes a short time to find out your shift has arrived. Inevitable. Like death.
From this Saturday Spanish government will allow us to go out for a walk. Mum says that you walk because you are looking for something. Yourself.
Day 46
Quarantine Journal
29.04.20
I fall asleep at 5 a.m. I fall asleep at 5 a.m. because I’m too pissed off and too exhausted for sleep. I wake up even more pissed off than I was the night before, and the situation gets even worst when I realise that someone has used my mug and I have to drink my coffee on another one, which is also horribly ugly.
The day flows between stupid questions, annoying noises and voices, the shitty and too loud music of the neighbours, and Sanchez who will reopen the borders only in July.
That’s how are increasing both the anger and the tension of being stuck with no way out, towards a future that we don’t know, because everything is closed: us, the borders, the opportunities, the smiles behind the masks.
There, even those are confined.
Day 48
Quarantine Journal
01.05.20
This quarantine makes me throw away everything I don’t need. Clothes, jewellery, accumulated useless crap.
I’ve always loved rings. I took them off and leave just two. The ring from Dublin, the ring from my father. Freedom, love. Lightness.
This quarantine gives me herpes. Stress for my crush gives me herpes, while he keeps writing me that we could be out walking soon, but he doesn’t suggest when, while I don’t even ask him where.
Day 50
Quarantine Journal
03.05.20
At the top of the mountain I went for real, but to retrace the trip I had with D. before the quarantine. I immerce myself in a field of flowers same as the one on ‘The colour purple’.
I wore the shoes I broke yesterday, so I also broke my feet, and now I feel like Frodo Baggins dragging himself through the torrid rocks of Mordor carrying the weight of his burdens.
Waiting for me at home there is a text with dude’s music, I send him my photos thinking that song expresses what seems impossible to say.
I guess then, what is possible to do, is plant more weed.
Day 52
Quarantine Journal
05.05.20
I start eating fruit again, that with this nice mess I need vitamins.
I was thinking about all the things I hadn’t done when I could, when I was free, when I had opportunities, and when I wasted them. I thought about the things I hadn’t said, and I thought now I have a chance. Not that there’s a way to avoid it anyway, but at the end perhaps that’s how you become free, expressing your truths, as L. said.
I am afraid that if I will talk with my friend and with dude about this love trinagle I will lose both of them. Then I remember that with this quarantine we are living a collective hallucination through chats.
Even if all this emotions seems more real than reality.
Day 53
Quarantine Journal
06.05.20
D. and I are turning the living room into a jungle.
D. fortunately has the green thumb that I am missing, plant killer. We spend the afternoon looking for a contact with nature and universe. I’m also looking for a contact with myself to face the conversation with my friends.
As we plant the seeds I realise that I need breathing and more space. As we plant the seeds I realize that I would directly need the plant already grown.
To smoke it.
Day 56
Quarantine Journal
09.05.20
I finally finish archiving the photos of my past and I understand that for live in the present maybe I should really figure how to be a woman. But then I reflect on what means to be a woman, concluding that there’s no reference, it’s relative, and I will happily remain a clumsy beast.
I rantle it to my person over the phone, while we talk about how in the outside world, now that we’re allow to go out, we’re slower and tired and we deviate our paths for keep the distance, because the other is scaring.
The other, here at La Linea, pours out onto the streets walking victoriously, spreading out, mastering and owning the space.
Do they ever experience freedom before?
Day 58
Quarantine Journal
11.05.20
Dude wants to know by our chat what I wanted to say by his face. Not that is gonna make much difference, I’m very good at communicating emotions either by being silent in person, as well as by not answering messages in chat. Elusion, a great talent that also my crush has.
I talk, he answers: everything was more clear when everything was more messed up.
I don’t know, I don’t understand.
My friend S. and I go for a walk on the beach for our hour of freedom. We sit in front of the shore, as the sunset falls behind the sea and the boats start shimmering on the invisible line of the horizon. Distant but close, visible but far.
‘Surreal. Probably they look so beautiful because we cannot reach them.’
Day 60
Quarantine Journal
13.05.20
I dreamt that I was on the beach. The sunset falling behind the sea, while I walked along the shore, surrounded by the water, with the tide rising, with the waves growing and coming towards me, while I was staying on the shore watching them submerge me.
The sea was pink.
D. and I plant sunflowers.
Day 62
Quarantine Journal
15.05.20
My friend S. cames to pick me up by cab. I’ve my make-up and my outfit on, it’s Friday night, and we hang out.
First official meeting after the quarantine, we go in Alcaidesa to celebrate the birthday of my friend here in Spain.
Dude doesn't join us, obviously.
Thankfully, as I feel in a middle of a nonsense triangle.
Outside everything looks the same even though everything is different, my way of interacting with people is different, more direct and more impatient, as if the lockdown reminded me that there is no time to lose compromising.
Everything seem resetted. It’s really a restart, but it’s like rebuilding something that has been destroyed, nothing returns as it was.
Day 64
Quarantine Journal
17.05.20
I’m going back to look for the cat. I can’t find the cat.
From the hallucination of the chat comes back also my crush, and then goes away. I cook for trying to forget, but instead I keep thinking about the cat, about what I feel for dude, about what I do not feel for my friend, and about what are the feelings of my crush – which I definitely do not understand. At this point the only thing which is clear, is that my friend P. was right, and the solution is to stay alone.
I’m looking for a flat in Tarifa.
I find a flat in Tarifa.
I book a flat in Tarifa.
Day 66
Quarantine Journal
19.05.20
Always stuck in front of the iMac to develop my project.
L. always depressed because he idles around.
D. always cleaning the kitchen, but finishing it.
The air smells jasmine. The fragrance of summer, the fragrance of lightness. The fragrance of freedom, in the time of lockdown. The fragrance of love, in the time of Corona.
This night I dreamt that I was running, trying to reach my plane for don’t miss it, I was late, I was rushing, it was a race against time, a rage against time. I wake up.
I will never find out if I reach or I lost that plane.
Day 68
Quarantine Journal
21.05.20
It’s because my friend here in Spain told me, I realise that since we have been released, and are allowed to leave the house, that at 8 p.m. from the windows claps, whistles, and sings have disappeared. Like everything is over, when in reality is just about to begin.
Or maybe we just resent that nothing will ever go back to the way it was. Will we be able to remember how life was before all of this?
I sit composed in front of the iMac to develop my project, to let myself be absorbed by my project, to leave no room for thoughts other than those dedicated to my project.
Day 70
Quarantine Journal
23.05.20
It’s also bitter the hungover the day after, that even though I spent the entire first month of quarantine drinking on the sofa in the living room and I should be trained, it seems that no matter what, if I drink out the night before, then the day after I can die inside.
I go to the shelter to looking for the cat. The cat is not there, but the volunteer explains me that if he has an ear cut off is probably because is a street cat, and when they find them on the streets tehy got spade, and that is the mark the vet makes for recognise them.
Abuses.
D. finds another kitten who is looking for a house, and in a month will find ours. My crush finds me in the hallucination of the chat, while I am eating vegetables in front of my project, while I am trying to distract myself from the awareness that I am waiting for him to do something, because I am too scared for do anything.
Day 72
Quarantine Journal
25.05.20
Since today we can go to the beach. Playa Poniente, the one under the flat.
I lie on the sand to absorb every ray of sunshine to let the light dry the insipidness of this immovable everyday life.
D. swims. D. will freeze to death because the water is warmer in Antarctica than in this sea. D. however seems indifferent to the frost and swims happily. He probably had to take off the insipidness as well by diving into the salt water.
Day 74
Quarantine Journal
27.05.20
I’ve been laughing all afternoon. If these two thought that I was going to Tarifa without leaving them with a nice memory, they were wrong.
I turn off the toilet light, is more effective with the darkness. I place a snake (+3 anos) in the bathroom, between the toilet and the bidet, a bit hidden but quite visible. Not visible for them apparently. At 10 p.m. from the bathroom L. jumps and sends us to hell, saying that we are assholes, to fuck off, and that without light it’s not cool at all. If the snake was real we’d all be dead by now.
From the chat with my crush, from a nice thing to read: ‘let go your demons and embrace yourself in the here and now.’
I should have dedicated this to L. when he found the plastic snake on the floor.
Day 75
Quarantine Journal
28.05.20
My friend S. says that into the cat I am projecting something else. Someone else.
I go back to try one last time to bring him to safety. I watch him hiding because I was scaring him, and at the same time approaching me because he wanted to be cuddled. I try to convince him to enter the prison of the carrier, but I couldn’t force him.
I leave the cat in his shelter and I go back to mine, realising that I value freedom more than safety.
Day 77
Quarantine Journal
30.05.20
Late for check-in in the new flat because I am still stuck in the old one, chatting with my friend in Spain about my moving, during a lockdown that makes every small change look enormous, and every distance insurmountable.
I leave the flat-space that I abused during the quarantine, and I no longer leave the gap-space for guilty feeling to abuse me. I close the laptop and I take my taxi to Tarifa.
From the Spanish coast I see the Moroccan one. I start to breathe and feeling a little lighter. The Levante blows and moves the grain fields under the golden sun, golden waves. The Levante blows into the new flat and moves me.
Day 80
Quarantine Journal
02.06.20
Standard routine. Call with my antique person from my nouveau terrace.
Both Desperados but both motivated. We talk about how often we feel as 2 unlucky craps, when in reality we are just 2 privileged lazy asses with the time to complain about our little problems, just because we already have everything we need in order to survive.
Day 82
Quarantine Journal
04.06.20
Knowing is good but not knowing is better. If they had told me in advance that the path for arrive to understand yourself and feel good was so difficult, and painful, and requiring so much effort, I would have continued to feel bad.
Call with mum. Bad news from home. The vet says our dog has probably only one year left to live. A year to live while I’m stuck wasting my time here, paying the price for my freedom.
And Tarifa’s Airbnb.
Day 84
Quarantine Journal
06.06.20
Flat squad in Tarifa.
Flat squad tripping in Tarifa.
We meet under the sun on the beach, and get lost under the reflection of the full moon, rising and melting in the night, liquids, deep oil, white light. We find ourselves with much more than we had before: body, mind, and spirit cit.
I laughed so hard that my jaw hurts. We emerged from that beach as if we had survived a shipwreck. That’s certainly what they thought at the chiringuito where we landed before returning home to fall asleep on the sofa, with that special confident feeling, trust.
Gratitude. Intimacy.
Day 86
Quarantine Journal
08.06.20
Dude is inside a bar.
I see him, sitting in front of the window. He sees me, walking down the street. We look at each other, I look away, I look at him again, he disappears. He appears again. He gets up, leaves the bar, crosses the street, comes towards me, looks at me, I look at him, I kiss him. We separate, he kisses me.
I wake up.
I look for a skirt in the colours of my trip, so I can surround myself again with the sensations I felt when I watched the full moon melt into darkness, hoping that maybe will melt in the night also my feelings for him.
Day 88
Quarantine Journal
10.06.20
New routines old. I wake up and go for a run in front of the ocean. I listen to the waves and meditate. I meditate and also continue not to think about the dramas, continue not to smoke, continue to exercise, and I am sleeping. The side effect of quarantine number 06 – the nightmares – remains, but the insomnia passes.
And anyway, with all this healthy living, jogging I’ve dislocated my knee, working out I’ve pulled my calf, my new shoes have cracked my hips, and I have a twitch in my eyelid.
Everything was better back when everything was worse.
Day 90
Quarantine Journal
12.06.20
I miss my friends.
I miss my family.
I miss my dog.
I miss a lot of things about life before the Corona, but the thing I miss most of all, and absolutely, terribly, to the point of going insane, is sex. I feel like I would easily be able to kidnap, detain, and take advantage of the Amazon guy on my next delivery.
I buy a crystal consolador to avoid ending up in jail for rape.
Day 92
Quarantine Journal
14.06.20
Call with mum while I am having lunch at the beach, to enjoy some physical freedom when the emotional one is still in lockdown.
I protest with her what dude asked me and what I reply in the hallucination of the chat, I protest with her what I should protest with him, realising that I have used too many words with the wrong person and didn't make enough actions.
I retreat to my flat as the transparent, shallow, calm sea retreats before the tsunami, and raise my energy for the last* attempt with dude.
*a/n lol
Day 94
Quarantine Journal
16.06.20
I think I spent the whole afternoon crying, cursing him for starting all of this, cursing at my own self for continuing it, and cursing this damn quarantine which with all its side effects, has to go to fuck off.
Enough for me, I give up. Because when you are not able to communicate, you compensate by doing, but if you don’t do anything, it’s just because you don’t care.
Day 96
Quarantine Journal
18.06.20
New routines old.
I wake up and meditate. I meditate, and let go my love crush drama. I meditate, and feel good even though I should feel shit.
I run, to the beach.
I run, to buy my ticket for fly back to Italy, for a weekend, as soon as Spain reopens the borders.
Day 98
Quarantine Journal
20.06.20
The sea is transparent, shallow, calm. My friend M. comes to visit me in Tarifa. On the beach, we talk.
‘You know, I always used to ask myself – why? – Why did he do this, why did she reply that, and so on. I thought that was helping me to understand the person in front of me. But you know what? You cannot force a connection. Or there is, or there isn’t. And darling, another thing I can assure you about, if a person wants to see you, will find a way.’
My friend M. is reading a book ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself’ so she tries out some of my routines and I try out some of hers.
#afflink
Day 100
Quarantine Journal
22.06.20
I needed silence to listen my thoughts. I needed space to let go all the old things and to let in the new ones.
The lockdown keeps haunting me with all the things I should have done in the past, but it has stopped distressing me with the things I would like to do in the future.
Everything is clear and under control.
The clarity for face the meeting with my manager and formalise the relocation request to New York. The clarity in reading the news that Trump has been quicker than me to formalise his request, issuing an executive order suspending the working visas for the US. The clarity in seeing my relocation request going to shit.
The clarity in laughing out of control because it’s obvious that also the karma is laughing with me. At me.
Day 103
Quarantine Journal
25.06.20
I have to get dressed during the day. Only because I don’t have curtains and I have new neighbours.
Day 104
Quarantine Journal
26.06.20
I can finally get undressed at night. Only because during the day I have to pretend I’m not naked all the time.
Day 106
Quarantine Journal
28.06.20
I got my period: thank goodness.
I got an idea: buy the flat in Tarifa.
I am going back to La Linea and I am happy to return to La Linea. I am happy to go back because I feel ready to face what I had put on hold and temporarily left behind. I am happy to be back because I am curious to find out which new things are waiting for me.
I missed what I had here, I am happy, and I am serene.
Day 108
Quarantine Journal
30.06.20
D. buys a boat.
I feel pretty confident in saying that in the event my flight gets cancelled, Spain closes its borders, or Italy doesn’t allow me to return home, I will go to my dog paddling.
All the routines that made me feel good in Tarifa, make me feel better also in La Linea, there is only one thing I truly miss.
Friday, at the airport.
-3
Day 109
Quarantine Journal
01.07.20
I don’t sleep, I have a cold, I stay offline from the office.
I stay in bed until lunchtime.
I stay in bed all day, but it’s not enough.
This bed somehow reminds me dude, when I was falling asleep waiting for his messages, and when I was waking up finding them. He would arrive at night, like the nightmares where you go deep down, and the dreams where you fly high.
Friday, at the airport.
-2
Day 111
Quarantine Journal
03.07.20
I don’t sleep the whole night, because it’s too hot, too itchy, too noisy, with too many seagulls.
The truth is that I don’t sleep the whole night because I’m too excited for my flight, for dude’s flight.
Blablacar, almost there. Airport, empty. I am running and speeding, it’s a countdown.
’Hi dude, I’m having an adrenaline rush because of our flights and are finally free.’ I am running and speeding, it’s almost the moment.
‘Where are you? I am at gate D63.’ The heart is beating faster, the moment is now.
When the plane takes off I feel the same emotion I felt when I moved abroad the first time. With the heart expanding, I realise that what I was missing was exactly this – vida es movimiento cit. I understand that the only way to be sure of not missing any opportunity is to take them all, and I understand that the way I want to live my life is exactly this, happy. And at the airport, even if sometimes it’s the wrong one.
Song of the day: I’ll fly with you (but from a different plane, from a different airport)
Travel quote: catch flights, not feelings
So in conclusion, I did not filtered the pictures, has to be real not nice. I did not enjoy the dramas, wtf. And I did not enjoy to be confined, but I did enjoy being confined with my amazing flatmates.
Seriously, was not fun, is just that who gets bored is boring cit. So in conclusion, what really went wrong? Everything, the airport and the other following lockdowns for instance, but at the end are the unexpected things that make life unique.
So in conclusion, I did not filtered the pictures, has to be real not nice. I did not enjoy the dramas, wtf. And I did not enjoy to be confined, but I did enjoy being confined with my amazing flatmates.
Seriously, was not fun, is just that who gets bored is boring cit. So in conclusion, what really went wrong? Everything, the airport and the other following lockdowns for instance, but at the end are the unexpected things that make life unique.
*This page contains affiliate links on stuff I liked (or made me laugh)*