Intimacy in Distance.

With the exception of my husband, I haven’t hugged or been hugged in weeks. I haven’t had chance encounters, friendly interactions with staff at the coffee shop, or shared rants about the state of the world with a single cab driver. I haven’t cooked a meal for friends or taken a lunch-break walk with a co-worker. I run a highly non-essential business which, though essential to me, has essentially ground to a halt. I’m thirteen weeks pregnant and though I’ve just crossed the first trimester secrecy hurdle, I haven’t embraced a single soul as I share the news.

Take-out is left by the door, no trace of the messenger. We smile politely at neighbors as the elevator door closes and we wait for the next. We swerve frantically to dodge each other when we pass in the street, avoiding eye contact, in case the awkwardness is contagious.

And yet, in the past week I’ve entered the bedrooms of co-workers, clients, students, Pilates instructors and CNN correspondents across the globe. (The deepened understanding I’ve gained through interiors alone has been fascinating.) I’ve taken remote yoga classes with my sister in London. I know exactly what my husband’s co-workers have had for dinner the past two evenings – I even know what they’re planning to do with their mortgage repayments. I’ve face-timed friends from bed first thing in the morning, still in my pajamas, still with my morning vampire hair un-combed. I’ve watched them as they cooked their dinner, walked their dog, scolded their children and brushed their teeth. We’ve no news to share but I’ve never had better conversations.

In social distancing, there has emerged not only a new normal, but a new intimacy. A shared vulnerability, a sense that whether we like it or not, we’re in this together. Together in our frustration, our disbelief, our sadness, our broke-ness.

Social media has always catered to and encouraged our deep-rooted voyeuristic tendencies, but this is different. Covid-19 has leveled the playing field. It’s become either impossible or even inappropriate to post images of a picture perfect, if often highly staged life. It’s hard to flaunt a fabulous life when we’re chained to our apartments – unless you’re posting from your second home in the Hamptons in which case honestly, we’re just not that interested. Things have got real. Real in a real-life kind of way, not a #nomakeupselfie kind of way.

We’ve got plenty of newfound time to talk about it, too. For many New Yorkers, the default response to the question of how one is doing is no longer ‘busy’, ‘so busy’ or ‘crazy busy’. It’s a lot harder to be non-committal in the time of Corona. If you pick up the phone to call someone, you know exactly where they are.

I can’t visit my mum in Ireland, nor my sister, step-mum and dad in London. I have no idea when I’ll be able to see them or hug them again. I’ve never felt further from home and at the same time I’ve never felt closer. I speak with my family almost every day, something I haven’t done since I left home ten years ago. I know what they’re reading, eating, watching and listening to, they know what I’m cooking, planning to cook, and what’s out of stock at my local grocery store. There is a wonderful closeness in the minutia this virus has forced us to share.

Even those closest to us have found themselves closer, intentionally or otherwise. Those moments of solitude before a partner comes home from work, those evenings for ‘me time’ when they’re out for drinks with friends – these have been ruthlessly snatched from us. All of our strange eating habits, self-care rituals and secret single behaviors are now fully out in the open, there’s simply nowhere to hide them in quarantine. For better or worse, in sickness and in health.

Seeing the evolution of the blooming magnolia trees along the route of my daily escape-the-apartment walk has become something I look forward to. I don’t know if I would have paid them anything close to the same amount of attention had I been rushing to work, headphones in, podcast going, mind already churning through my mental to-do list for the day. There is a certain inner peace that has emerged from this chaos, not to mention a sincere appreciation and gratitude for the workers who haven’t been given the luxury of quarantine and are instead fighting battles currently unimaginable to most.

Many of us approach the end of a vacation filled with good intentions for the life we’re returning home to, only to find they’ve disappeared as soon as we’ve hit the airport taxi line. I hope some of the closeness we’ve gained through this crisis lingers a little longer. Our individual lives will look very different from one another once we’ve been set free but if this virus has shown us anything, we’re all in this strange, messy, wonderful life together.