(This is an ‘A Day in the Life’ post that I’ve only done once before – read: A New York Sunday. So here’s another one, credits to Kyla Zhao my love, for the inspiration.)
12:00am I go onto Canvas, click the Zoom link, and wait for the class to load. I’m on my bed, wearing a t-shirt and elephant pants. I angle the camera so that my life-sized Pooh bear lingers mysteriously at the edge of the frame. Here begins the second last class of my semester: HDS 2052 Religion Around Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez: Their Writings and Lives, taught by Profé David Carrasco. Every class this week is a farewell ritual. The virtual simulacrum of campus education is coming to an end, as is the last structure to my days…
1:48am We are discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m trying hard to reign in my yawns, but then the discussion grabs my attention and dispels drowsiness. Someone draws our attention to a passage:
So effective was the quarantine that the day came when the emergency situation was accepted as a natural thing and life was organized in such a way that work picked up its rhythm again and no one worried any more about the useless habit of sleeping.
In a novel filled with plagues of all kind, the first one that the inhabitants of Macondo encounter is the plague of insomnia, which induces the loss of memory, a fictionalized past that can only be read in tarot cards, and an experience of solitude for each and every one of them. This state of emergency becomes normalized.
As the class chatters, I balance the novel on my thigh and flip through my annotations. I spot my scribble of “Covid…” on the margins of page 322. Towards the end of the novel, there’s another plague of unending rain for four years, eleven months, and two days, during which the sense of time vaporizes:
He had seen them as he passed by, sitting in their parlors with an absorbed look and folded arms, feeling unbroken time pass, relentless time, because it was useless to divide it into months and years, and the days into hours, when one could do nothing but contemplate the rain.
Staying at home, my days blur into each other. OHYS is as much a portrait of a family as it is, uncannily, a history of humanity.
2:15-2:40am Class is over. Somehow I’m too excited to sleep. I put my legs up vertically against the wall and cultivate darkness in my head. Sometime between these timestamps, I fall asleep.
12:03pm My mom bursts into my room, hollering at me to wake up. I stare at her from under my blankets, bolster, pillows, and jungle of hair. She narrows her eyes at me, and barks, “Go weigh yourself, quick!”
12:10pm I weigh myself and write my weight down with a marker on the glass board. The numbers are in steady ascent, with only occasional dips. There’s no bucking the trend. My mom shoots me a withering look and dramatically enunciates, “Oh my God.” My dad is more subtle: “Maybe try to eat less today. Don’t lose faith.” I secretly pledge not to snack for today, but my blasé countenance irks my mother, who threatens, “You’re not getting rice.”
12:43pm We eat lunch. My mom cooks up a storm with fish, eggs, tofu, and winter melon soup. My dad sneaks me a bowl of brown rice.
1:31pm My mom absolves me from dishwashing duty because I need to read for class.
1:47pm I lean against the wall, reading Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria. I rarely read book-length travel writing so the book is quite a departure from what I’ve been reading lately. Tonight, the seminar will be discussing narratives of return between the UK and Nigeria.
4:03pm I get weirdly hungry and surreptitiously eat a bowl of peanuts. As I down them with tea, I type out this post in medias res.
5:43pm The daily numbers are out (more accurately, they have been out for two hours) but I’m somehow the first in my family to spot it. My dad’s in a video conference and my mom is napping. There are 690 new COVID-19 cases in Singapore today, a slight rise from the day before (528) but in a downward trend overall. Relieved that the daily infection rate is no longer above a thousand, I take a screenshot of the article and send it to the family group chat.
6:09pm A buzz. I look up from my reading to see a bee pummeling the windowpane with its head, oblivious to the fact that freedom and open skies are but a gap away, relentless in its myopia. Behind me, my parents are getting ready to eat a watermelon. My mom asks, “Is it red or is it yellow?” My dad doesn’t know either. They stare at it, willing it to be either. (It’s yellow.)
7:55pm I finish reading Looking for Transwonderland.
8:48pm It pours. Thunderstorms announce themselves with a rustle of the trees. I pull up a poem of weathers that I sent in a funny email correspondence yesterday:
Is the sky a circular plot?
A world repeating, as Ursula said.
Or maybe a theater above our heads,
playing in unbroken, relentless time,
watching our solitude in silent mime,
until we look up to contemplate?
9:20pm My family gets ready for our daily dose of Zumba in the living room, as lightning flashes outside like a palpable instrumental. I navigate the Sunny Funny Fitness Youtube channel on the TV. My favorite routines so far are her 15 minute BTS, Dance Monkey, Fancy, Azukita, and 22 minute Diet Dance workouts. Even my dad joins in for five minutes, bobbing to the beat. My mom and I shimmy and leap around till we are soaked in sweat. “I’m a puddle,” I yell. “Burn your fats!” my mother exclaims happily.
10:03pm I take an icy cold shower and then steam my face, with my hair in a turban (because I woke up too late to do it this morning).
10:52pm Staying at home has whittled down my skincare routine. First, I abandoned sunscreen. Then, the entire morning routine flew out the window. Next, my multi-step nighttime skincare routine started shrinking. Now, there are only four steps left: hydrating mist, hydro-plumping re-texturizing serum, eye gel, and snail cream.
11:03pm I clean my laptop, phone, glasses, and books for class with alcohol wipes and spread them out on a bath towel.
11:36pm I write my novel-in-progress and this blog post on the bed.
12:45am Zoom time! It’s my final class of the spring semester — COMPLIT 277 Literature, Diaspora, and Global Trauma, taught by Professor Karen Thornber.
At one point, I had wished this semester would just end amidst the tumult of packing, goodbyes, flying, quarantine, climbing infection rates and death tolls, and a world that seems to be collapsing. But, the tenuous thread linking me to campus has been a patch of sanity and clarity in a life that’s gradually losing its outline. In times like this, the luxury of university education is made starkly apparent — it’s the luxury of thinking about big questions beyond the myopia of the crisis, of reading, writing, conversing, and learning amidst life-and-death turmoil. Reading puts things in perspective — the broader questions on migration, displacement, dignity, and citizenship are as urgent as ever. In a moment when individuals seem so powerless, swept up in the waves of history, I’m not looking for prescriptions of social justice in the stories I read, but instead, the possibilities of collective speculation. Our awareness of our own vulnerabilities imbues solidarity across space and time.
Weirdly too, in the little pods of our separate existence, technology has reinvented our reality. In this hybrid life of the digital and physical sensorium, it’s remarkable how we’ve come to realize that we are still irrevocably human. Human contact and intimacy are distorted by distance. We are marked indelibly by solitude. Yet, there’s still amazingly convivencia — what Profé Carrasco calls the ‘capacity to give life the upper hand over death.’
Farewell, Junior Spring. I will remember you forever.
Hope you and your loved ones are all staying safe and healthy. God bless and may the world tide through this soon and reach the other shore. x
Praying and with love,
