The give and take of quarantine also may be considered in terms of time. We sacrifice today for tomorrow and tomorrowโs joy. Quarantine, as sorrowful as it is, was optimism. To believe in quarantine meant to have faith in afterward, whether in 40 or 400 days. Yet the price of this hope was a panicked, suspended animation. The price was โthis moment,โ an overzealous now going nowhere. By warping the present, quarantine was limbo between the past and the future, where time stagnates even as it moves in all directions at once. To quarantine was to survive, but with an asterisk. It was not just to make it through but to imagine how to overcome. The most radical gesture, then, may not be to emerge from quarantine but to figure out how to persist within it, always. To appreciate complexity, to acknowledge hardship, to wonder why things are what they are and whether they must always be so. (They mustnโt.) To wake and sleep, gain and lose weight, grow gray and cover it up, bake bread this week and buy it the next. To be inside/outside, here/there, past/future: that was the lesson of quarantine and will be its memory. Life is just like that, the shifting and the growing, the imagining and the dreading, the promise of tomorrow that one day, someday, wonโt arrive. Quarantine wasnโt, and isnโt, over.
Liminal Space by Devon Powers
