Journal entry from Monday, June 7:
Vaccinated today! Oh, and I did the maths. 500 days on the dot.
***
Five hundred and ten days ago, I told my mum I’d see her in six months. We hugged. She cried. I waved from the departure gate and hoisted my bag a little higher, thinking ahead to the flight — not to home, because I wasn’t going home. Beyond the flight to Budapest, to my apartment where all my stuff waited. It was a kind of home. Specifically, I was thinking about where in the city my friends and I would catch up after spending Christmas visiting our respective families on our respective continents.
Ten days later, a man went to hospital in Victoria.
Fast forward through five hundred days that nobody wants to reminisce, and I’m no longer living in Budapest. Many of my friends moved on, some by choice and others as a consequence of an accumulated dread that, at some point during the last five hundred days, got too much. But I’m not back in Perth either. Five hundred days seems like such a long time for so little and so much to have happened.
Mum and I didn’t get to see each other as planned. We talked about it for months leading up; it was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime — forty years since she’d been to Europe. I was so excited to show her my not-quite-home near the Danube. To introduce her to all those friends who are now scattered every which way around the world.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “If we can’t meet this year, we’ll just do it next year or the year after. Europe will still be there.”
“Sure, but I might not be in Europe,” I said. “Let’s keep trying to make it work. Surely this virus thing will be done and dusted by summer.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
***
Four days ago, mum turned sixty-five. I video called her from my office in Copenhagen to wish her a happy birthday. We talked about the dog, the weather, her plans for the weekend, her favourite winter jumper. She showed me the laundry renovations. I introduced her to my colleague. It felt too normal, talking to her floating head through a five-inch screen that I really need to clean, doing the maths for the hundredth time to convert time zones across the world. She said my brother was coming over soon with his new puppy.
Tick, tick, tick — that’s me counting off all the mundane things I’ve missed that now seem monumental. Ticking them off also feels too normal. I’m sure she’s keeping a list as well. Mum loves her lists.
***
It’s winter in Perth. When I talk to friends from there, we often compare Copenhagen spring to Perth winter, finding the analogies endlessly amusing. Grey there, grey here. Patches of blue here, though, and the sun stays out later now.
***
Five hundred days ago exactly, a man went to hospital in Victoria, across the country from where mum was inspecting houses that my brother might want to buy.
Tick, tick, tick.
Ninety days (or so) after that, I spoke to my best friend on the phone. “Why don’t you come back?” she said. “Even if it’s temporary. It’s scary to think of you over there, so far away in a foreign country.”
“Mate, I’m in France,” I said. That’s right, I remember now — I was in France, outrunning the rolling lockdowns that were still so novel and knee-jerky. “It’s hardly a third-world country. I have insurance, I’ll be fine. And besides, Europe is going to bounce back from this virus thing so much faster than Australia.”
“But if you came home, then at least you know you’d be safe.”
“Two things. First, you know it’s not home anymore. And two, would you?”
That worked. My friend sighed down the phone, but I could hear she was smiling. “No, you’re right. You got me, you bastard. I wouldn’t come home; I would see it through.”
“Well, there you go.”
Did I back the wrong horse? It’s hard to know. My stinging shoulder, the little piece of cotton wool taped down by the nurse who stuck the needle in, says maybe not. Then again, my Instagram feed of festivals and mask-free lives chafes against that confidence. In my own tiny chauvinistic universe, day five hundred is a beginning rather than an ending. Nothing ends except the agoraphobia that gives me pause every time I leave the house. Everything begins to seem possible. Whether it really is, or it’s just the medicine (or the fever) tricking my brain into blue-sky optimism, really isn’t up to me.
***
Five hundred days ago, a man went to hospital in Victoria. He was the first to show up with this new virus thing, or at least the first to admit it. Not that anyone should begrudge this man. If it weren’t him, it would have been somebody else. Maybe then I would be getting vaccinated four hundred and ninety-seven days after the first case, or five hundred and two. Whatever the situation, five hundred days is a hell of a long time to spend in limbo. Not knowing when I will get to see mum or wash my clothes in her new laundry, while my brother’s dog tries to trip me over, spilling the overflowing laundry basket I’m carrying.
Will my brother’s dog still be a puppy? Maybe. Maybe I’ll miss my best friend’s 30th birthday, a wedding, a few babies, my oldest friends growing up.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
***
People say it could be worse — I disagree. It is worse. So much worse, for so many people. I won’t be arrested when I eventually go back to my country. Privilege, the same privilege that means I haven’t felt unsafe or needed to wonder if the nurse is injecting saline, has endowed me with choices. ‘At risk’ has never applied to me, and, perhaps most importantly, nobody I love was taken this way.
Even if Copenhagen is overcast more than sunny, my physical and financial health are safe for five, six, fifteen hundred days. Things could be incommensurably worse. Not even on the same colour spectrum.
They are behind me now, those five hundred grey days. Some were an ominous shade, and others blue with only the lightest silvery clouds on the horizon. I can only hope, selfishly, ardently, with the vitality of science in my veins, that I don’t need to wait another five hundred days.
But if I do, so what? What’re a measly few hundred days in the grand scheme? And here’s where the grey gets lighter. In my head, I’m back at the departure gate, planning the party we’ll all have when I land. We’ll turn the music low to hear each other better. Late in the night, when we’ve run out of big stuff to talk about, we’ll start in on the small stuff, tick-tick-ticking our way down the list until we understand the bigness buried among the ordinary, waiting to be unearthed as we tick down the never-ending list. I’m at the departure gate, waving with my good arm, not the one where the needle went in.
***
Did I back the wrong horse when it limped out of the gate five hundred days ago? I’m giving it another five hundred days before I call the race.
