It is not natural for me to be this sedentary. The innate desire to wander and explore comes as natural to me as my sensitivity towards animals or my predisposition to foods heavily flavoured with garlic. But here I am, on my couch—the very same couch that I’ve been sitting on for nearly a year reading, writing, watching Netflix—and while I’m bored, it’s become the new normal of my life. The sun rises. The sun sets. My only escape is through a screen.
Another aspect of “the good ol’ days” I’ve recently come to miss are the peripheral people who’ve been in my life. People that I’ve never formally met or held conversation with but who played as background actors in the scenes of my day. There is the Somali man, slight in stature, who stood on the corner of my block each morning enjoying a cigarette while observing traffic through eyeglasses perched half-way down his nose. He’s performed this daybreak ritual for years. We’d occasionally nod our heads at each other in recognition of being neighbours of sorts but I don’t know his story and he doesn’t know mine.
There were the people employed at a coffee shop across the street from my office who crafted one of my favourite sandwiches (saskatoon berry-turkey with arugula and brie on toasted ancient grains). Within the past year, it has sadly shut its doors. I never got to know their names. Besides being a familiar face, they never got to know mine.
The time I’d walk up to the entrance of my condo at the end of each workday would occasionally be mirrored in commute from the opposite direction by a bearded man who lives on another floor in the building. We would make convivial small talk while checking our mailboxes. I learned he worked at the nearby hospital. He would learn that I was involved in the arts. But it was just a slight connection. Enough for acquaintance but not enough for anything more meaningful outside the confines of an elevator. I never learned his name. He never learned mine. I haven’t seen him in over a year.
While I lament their absence, these characters have been recast for the current season.
Most people in my building now work from home and while I have not met a lot of them, I do get a sense of their day through the sound filtering from the hallways and above. One of my neighbours plays an instrument. I can hear the muffled output from their amp every morning around eleven a.m.. They also have a small dog. I’ve never seen it and wouldn’t be able to identity breed but can hear the faint pitter-patter of its paws walking across the laminate floor. There’s a family at the other end of the hallway that moved in just before the start of the pandemic. Their child, perhaps feeling bored and caged, spends most of the day screaming in frustration at the top of her lungs. Her parents—and their immediate neighbours—are often in my thoughts. And then there’s the contractors I occasionally pass. I wouldn’t be able to recognize their faces but I do remember their masks.
As the pandemic forces us into a second year of distance and isolation, I’m starting to feel sadness at the loss of the seemingly unmemorable interactions I had with strangers in the past. Their presence was familiar where nothing in this current world is. They offered a form of stability to my days and I genuinely miss them … even though I didn’t know them.