I used to write in coffee shops. I used to write in classrooms. I used to write in parks, in libraries, at wineries, and, once, on a bus.
Now, I write at a small desk in my bedroom.
The previous owner of the unremarkable mid-century modern house we’ve lived in for nearly two years left it behind when he moved, and while I can forgive one for assuming this particular desk is, therefore, rubbish, it is no such thing. In the five months, I have been in lockdown, it has become my whole world.
It was once a school desk, meant for two students, side by side. It is perhaps three feet long and boasts two cubbies, separated; perfect for textbooks, with a slight indentation for a pencil or two. The legs are metal, and although half of the paint has been rubbed off, a casualty of years of carelessly braced feet, what is left is the beautiful antique green known as calke, a deep sage made famous by Farrow and Ball that graced the breakfast room of the famous Darbyshire abbey. The antique wooden chair I sit in is painted the same color and is uncomfortable, but aesthetically pleasing, which counts for little when I am seated and everything when I enter my bedroom and see it standing cheerfully, waiting.
The top is pale wood Formica and chipped, but hardly consequential because it is rarely visible.
There are two computers, one stationary, one not; the former I use to listen to music though it is actually meant to serve as the hub of our household network, the consequence of a husband who works in tech. The latter is my laptop. There are speakers, routers, and disk drives. There is even a mouse, rarely used. These are the ordinary things, and they are not beautiful; a part of me resents their presence, but I have grown begrudgingly used to them as the months have skulked by because as I have adopted this desk, a necessity as my world has narrowed, I have filled it with enough curiosities that I hardly notice the monotonous green lights and sharp, silver lines.
There are beeswax candles, pillars not yet burned, and the stubs of sheets of wax I rolled myself, slightly lopsided. There are animal bones, glass phials of moth wings, and a cup of feathers. There are stones that have names I’ve forgotten; there is a crystal door knob set in green cast iron, and a bundle of black sage I’ve yet to burn. I do not believe in its ability to cleanse or produce vivid dreams and hallucinations, but its sharp, spicy smell is pleasant, and sometimes I find myself reaching for it when a plot thread has me particularly flummoxed. There is a stack of books, some I’ve read recently, others yet to be read, and I thumb through them absently when my fingers grow tired of typing and itch for the feel of paper between them. One of the books is my own, and although I use it primarily as a reference, sometimes I shuffle through the pages and stop to read a paragraph or two. It reminds me of the world before.
There are notebooks, of course, but unlike my fellow wordsmiths who freely admit to collecting them despite never intending to mar their perfectly pristine pages, mine are full of names and questions and illegible scrawling that may or may not be important plot points and are probably how tousled one character’s hair looks after another has run their hands through it. Tacked on a corkboard is my first book contract, surrounded by botanical ephemera; beside it, pages from a vintage French book of flowers: Lis blanc, Crassule, Hortensia, Pied d’alouette. I grow some of them in my garden.
At night, my writing desk is lit by fairy lights and tiny flames, and this is my favorite time of all.
No one inhabits this world but me, and it is mine, lovingly curated during a time when getting out of bed is difficult, let alone creating, sharpening aesthetics and images and half-remembered dreams into tangible plots and characters and dialogue. I am myself when I sit in the rickety wooden chair, even if my back bears the brunt of the horrid posture it invites if I stay too long, and although I do not write as quickly, now, as unreservedly, as joyfully as I did when the world was different, the words themselves are not less; they are hard-won, and, sometimes they are even better.
For me and so many others, lockdown has threatened my identity in ways I could never have imagined. Who am I when I am not standing at the head of a classroom? Who am I without the company and counsel of my friends? Who am I when I am with my husband and daughter far more than I’ve ever been in the last ten years? The answer is, of course, still me, but the effort of remembering, of reminding myself, is exhausting, and I am so very tired of being exhausted.
Despair has come easy, far easier than I would have thought, for I always imagined myself resilient, owed far more to the cynic in me than the optimist. I am used to difficulty, and I treat my hardships irreverently, with a sharp tongue and a whiff of martyrdom because I am used to them by now and know that wailing and hair-pulling are pointless, if cathartic. The difficulty is still there, waiting, at the end of it. Oh, good, it says pleasantly as I blink with red-rimmed eyes and a head full of cotton. You’re back. Now, where were we?
I still have such days because I am, after all, only human, and given to flares of the dramatic. But I have also found that the best days I have spent in lockdown have been those in which I have, intentionally and with purpose, brought joy in my world, however small it has become: seeds planted with my daughter that have grown into carrots she pulls and eats on lazy, sweltering afternoons; a bottle of my favorite wine shared with my husband; a lazy nap taken with my equally lazy cat; an evening spent in front of the fire pit in the backyard, the smoke curling into the twilight sky from a stick I have held in the flames until its tip is smoldering.
And, of course, my writing desk with its legs of calke green and merry collection of strange, beautiful things that litter every surface.
While I wait for the world outside to heal, I have created my own within, and every texture and color and scent is mine, a reminder of who I am, even on those days when I struggle to reconcile the person this tragedy would have me be, and the one I wish to remain. When, at last, this is all over, for one day it will be over, the world will not be the same as it was when I left it, nor will I be, but it will not have been cynicism that will have shaped me but joy found in the most inconsequential: beeswax candles; moth wings; the pages of a book.
And a desk with calke green legs left by a man who will never know how much it has meant to me these past few months to have a place that I have made mine, where I have known joy, and myself.
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