(write it!) like disaster
The first thing I missed was the hand towel in the office bathroom.
I have never liked disposable paper towels. It’s a sensory thing, I think. In the bathroom where I work — in a weird old institution in which nothing is really built for purpose, having been set into existence centuries ago and largely left to its own devices since — we were supplied on a daily basis with actual hand towels. They came directly from the small legion of cleaning staff who I would always see getting the place ready for another day, every morning, on my way to my desk. I had been there for nearly a year, when the hand towel disappeared, and had become familiar enough with the cleaning staff to chat to them first thing or over lunch. I thought I was finding my rhythm.
The day I found the hand towel missing from the rack, replaced with a stack of paper towels on the counter by the sink, I thought: goddamn it. I thought: it’ll be back tomorrow. And I carried on.
The hand towel was not back tomorrow. Over the subsequent days, laminated hand-hygiene guides went up in bathrooms and corridors all around the college. Someone came in to install dispensers for hand-sanitiser, motion-activated to mitigate the risk of surface transmission. The news got worse, which is to say that the news got closer. We all breathed a little less easily in the daily queue for lunch.
I stayed late one night to go to a service at the chapel, where I’d thought I was meant to be reading aloud. The chaplain had misinformed me, and I wasn’t needed at all in the end, but I stuck around regardless; I have never been able to summon up any belief in God or adjacent entities, but I like ritual, and I like watching people believe in something. The college chapel is so beautiful. Back before the turn of the year, my colleagues helped the chaplain hang the most alarmingly hefty Star of Bethlehem from the high vault of the ceiling; they came back to the office delighted that nobody had managed to get hurt in the process, and that the disconcertingly-thin length of whatever it was that kept the Star aloft had held up for yet another Christmas.
Before Communion, the chaplain announced that the Church had advised against the use of the common cup, and against shaking hands to share the peace. There was hand sanitiser, he said, at the entrance to the chapel. On my way out, I stopped to talk to the student who was collecting up hymn books and keeping an eye on the hand sanitiser table. I was tired, and the world was changing around me, and a part of me was frightened to take the bus back home. I wish I could remember what I said to him.
A few days after that, I booked a week of annual leave, with less than a week of notice. A few days after that, I left my colleagues in the office for what remains, at the time of writing, the final time. A few days after that, late on the Tuesday night of my anxious week of downtime, the country went into lockdown.
A friend on Twitter, earlier today, was reminiscing about the feel of a heavy backpack on her shoulder as she hurried through an airport or a campus. Tonight, carrying my groceries home and breathing through my black cotton mask, I thought about how she’d phrased it. turns out the art of losing is really hard to master, unfair that no one bothered to warn us. And I thought: it hurts.
W