Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Nine

A baby cries in the distance and I go still, straining to hear. But the sound vanishes as quickly as it came. I can hear the quickened footsteps of someone in boots passing. By the time I go to look out the window the street is empty. A rarity, even in this time of quarantine law.

Above is a cloudless sky. The sun is warm in a way it hasn’t been since spring began to make its tentative way into the Lost Quarter. It feels like a new beginning.

They are beginning to ease the quarantine restrictions in the Quarter. It is a tentative process. Even then there are many who feel it is too fast, that we are not prepared. But of course we will never truly be prepared in the way they want us to be. We cannot be entirely safe from the dread lord now. Not when he has already breached the walls of our defences.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Eight

This is the stuff of dreams. Nightmares maybe. Standing on a street corner in the shadows, just beyond the glare of the lamps, hat pulled low and eyes hard as diamonds.

A shadow drifts across the light and I follow, digging into the pockets of my jacket until I find the cold, hard metal there. It just makes me uneasy, offering no comfort. I still grasp it tightly all the same.

The shadow disappears around the corner and I stand at the crossroads, lost for the moment. Unsure where to go. Do I dare follow? Something like fog hangs in the air, a cloud passing over the streetlamps.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Seven

A lone figure makes his limping way down the street. It is a painful progression, the man leaning heavily on his crutches, unable to put his full weight on either of his legs. Even from this distance I can recognize his form and hobbled gait.

He has been in this part of the Lost Quarter for quite some time, having arrived from parts unknown seemingly to stay. I see him often making his slow way somewhere, his face set with resolve. Occasionally he has stopped for a time to rest on some ledge or bench, his crutches set aside.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Six

A day of correspondences, flurry after panicked flurry. No time for thought really. Just reviewing them and replying as best I can, trying to make sense of it all. There is confusion, anger, sadness, and delight hidden amongst those words – mine at least – though one would never know it to scan their formal register.

It is strange when looked at from a certain perspective. Nothing tangible is accomplished, just words and more words, back and forth. And yet consequences arise from them that ripple here and there, to every part of our lives.  It is, in fact, hard to look away from the correspondences, to not come to believe that they amount to the sum of the world. They are a part of it surely, and in this time of quarantine necessarily the greater part, though I long for an hour or two with no further dispatches.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Five

I’ve got eyes for you, tucked away in the closet, sealed in a cardboard box. The tape holding it shut is wearing, it hardly sticks anymore. I have peeled it back so many times to pull them out and study them.

Divorced from their sockets, their natural habitat, they are strange things. Not so round as you would think, a little misshapen at the back, with that odd nerve extending out. They have the look of flesh about them, but of course they are not. I pull them out on occasion and roll them about in my fingers, like marbles that I might play with.

This is no game though. You will recall what is owed. I have not forgotten and I see all my debts paid, in blood or otherwise. We will meet again, through happenstance or otherwise, and then we will see this through to its conclusion.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Four

The days pass, one after the other, all seeming much the same. That is a comfort as much as it is a horror. What if all day’s are the same in the end? What meaning would all this have then?

Take pleasure in the simplest things in life it is said. The repetition of everything, these eternal cycles. The sun rising and setting, the passing of hours. Of such things a day is made. Someday they may no longer hold.

We have forgotten so much. No longer do we remember what it was like when everything was crumbling, seeming destined to fall into utter ruin. Now it seems we may be approaching that precipice again and we have no experience to bring to it. That was lost long ago.

In the Quarter all that remains in the end is the wind and the grassy plains. The rest, all those who have passed through, are worn away as the years go by until no signs are left that they were ever there at all.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Three

The days are long and hard. The work is good, I suppose. It distracts from all that is at hand, though I long for a moment of idleness and peace. That is what this quarantine seemed to promise, at least if one believes what one reads. 

Instead I am trapped in my home, not by quarantine law (though of course it still stands) but by my correspondences and my writings. Proof enough that the world proceeds as ever, regardless of the dread lord’s incursions. The demands and deadlines are the same, it is just the context of it all that has shifted.

That would be worth some satisfaction if I weren’t so damned tired of it all.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty Two

What could be better than an afternoon spent at the library, pulling books from the shelf. There is always a serendipitous discovery to be made and new worlds to enter. That is what I am missing today, wandering from shelf to shelf with no purpose, no author in mind, just seeing what I will find.

In my home I have an antique bookshelf that has passed through generations of my family. It is a hand-hewn piece, circular in design, so that you can spin it about to find the volume that you seek. There is a small plate set on one of the shelves noting the year of its construction and the patent the maker claimed. It was constructed for a preacher, my family being lousy with them at the time.

On this Sunday of the quarantine it is my library. I turn its shelves and look at the books there. Many are unread, for I am a collector of unread books. I have never seen the purpose in keeping books I have finished, someone else should have those pleasures. I have new ones to discover.

Still, though I possess many unread volumes, the ones I don’t are what entrance me. To stumble upon something unknown, especially now that it is denied me, is what I yearn for most.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty One

As we are all struggling to cope with our enforced confinement, coupled with the dread at what comes when we are at last given our release, I thought I would share the routine that has kept me well-occupied and, if not unworried, at least not entirely consumed by the anxieties of this dreadful age.

5:30am: I awaken for the first time, restive and haunted by some dream. Staring at the darkness I try to puzzle together those images and scenes that never quite fit until I can drift back to sleep.

6:30am: My love’s alarm goes off on her phone, stirring me awake again. I ignore it as I do every morning and return to sleep.

7:00am: My alarm comes on. I hit snooze.

7:30am: At last I relent and give in to the crowing of my alarm and rise from bed, feeling irritable and unwilling to face the day.

Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Fifty

A sunny, glorious day and my love and I return to the river to walk, wandering through the valley and then out and above into the bluffs. There we can see the river winding and curling through a landscape at once familiar and foreign.

People wander past as we stare down at the majestic view, coming in pairs or alone. Behind us three teenagers have gathered together in defiance of the quarantine law. It is oddly a comfort, teenagers still being defiant in these trying times.

As we wander along the bluff, keeping the river in sight to our right, we come across a small memorial in the midst of a grassy knoll. It is a sandstone block with a metal plate set atop it, about waist height, marking the passing of a Muscovite princess who had lived her life in exile in the Quarter.

We stood awhile, my love and I, looking down at the river’s course. A breeze stirred and we set out on our way.