Within the daily flux that the world is in, distance isn’t what it used to be. In days gone by—and really, anything pre-Corona appears to feel that way some days—distance was left to the wider sweep: the span between two towns sprawled out on a map; the largeness between epochs; an expanse that defined one half of your life from another; the breadth between two people in a failed relationship.
Within our homes and our chosen private sanctuaries, under a global lockdown, distance, now, goes by another face. Members of one family keep to themselves, or at a length that assures some level of safety. This is strange human behaviour, but legitimate in its own way. Notes on the day are exchanged across living rooms, entire conversations unfurl between rooms and the conjoined helpfulness of twin balconies.
For those living alone, in apartments and short-term rentals, the experience is one of the yawning gaps that separate them from the world at large, rendering even universally unavoidable tasks—grocery runs, medical store stopovers—epics of pathos and revelation, replete with soliloquies and no doubt newfound attachments to God.
For the destitute and the homeless, distance becomes both a non-concept and a non-issue. It has little meaning in their lives, save perhaps for the endless gulf that bridges a previous existence, and a hometown, with urban anonymity and the brutal pangs of migratory flight. The only difference for a human out on the streets today is that his or her facelessness looks out at an entirely changed city—left blank, plain, devoid of humans and traffic and the overpowering surge of bigger, higher, faster–more. The lives of the homeless, in a sense, now carry greater nobility. If everyone’s alone, doesn’t that make loneliness, well, less lonely?
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