Poetry during the pandemic

In the beginning, there were fewer masks and dust-caked buses. We had order. We had a routine. Though I woke up and brushed my teeth at a particular time and slept within the schedule I had a sense of productivity. In the beginning, I had grabbed my toothbrush and a suitcase full of winter clothes to my hometown assuming the world would continue to spin in a span of two weeks. Never had I been this wrong. It was humiliating how wrong I was. In my hometown, the village that was often unbothered outside their hillside bubble began to wear masks and slapped on sanitiser before they shook hands. It was funny as no one in my village shook hands, they often nodded for a sense of acknowledgement. It was a day like this that I want to describe right now. I had woken up unaware of the day or time or even month on my yellow bed that had been laid out on the floor. I felt uneasy. A sense of paranoia shot up my spine and my legs began to wobble at the edge of my bed. I had come to a realisation that I had absolutely nothing to do. It wasn’t the nothing that you do when you complete hours or weeks of work. It was the silencing nothing. You can’t speak in the silence because you have nothing to say anymore. Everything had been said, every book upon reach, read and every season of every show was binged. It was a sense of nothingness that rattled my spine every day after that day. It was a silence that was accompanied with the occasional sound of me munching on egg whites and fryums. As the calendar pages were torn with confusion the days became more monotonous. It was one long day with several nap breaks. It was exhausting though I barely moved a muscle. Poetry during the pandemic seemed like the only thing that made me feel less numb to the constant cemented walls around me.