How to beat the Covid Blue

Lately, time seems to be a foreign concept. What is time? Is time the flying snowflake outside my window on an April day? Is time the endless reels to watch on Instagram? Is time the screenshots of my nephew every time I video-call home? No one knows for sure, certainly not me. When Germany enters yet another lockdown, or half of it, whatever the politicians call, I am quite certain I have lost the concept of time.

When one is in lockdown, one has a lot of time to muse. When one muses, time ceases to exist. There are days I am so lost in my head that only by standing up and seeing the ground swallowing me up, I realise I have not had a meal at all. I am so busy daydreaming about the life I want that I forget the life I have. Even when my thought is not depressing – I hope I grew pass that phase, spending too much time inside one’s head is still not healthy. (Thank you, my heart, for reminding me that you need fuel to keep beating.)

My mom offers a solution: she schedules our daily call so that she can remind me to function like a human being. She reminds me that I still have a family in this reality who are waiting for me to come home, that this reality is not less beautiful than the one I build inside my head. It felt a little funny at first, carrying the Ipad around my apartment as I did my chores while watching my mom changing my nephew’s diaper, but it feels human now. When she cannot call, for whatever reason, someone else would: my dad, my brother, my sister-in-law, my little army of cousins and aunts and uncles. When I run out of things to do around the apartment, they recommend me what to do next: whether trying a new recipe or showing them my new projector or even teaching them how to braid hair – just mundane little things to stop me from drifting away.

Over a year of lockdown and I have yet acquired a new language, a new skill, or a new website. What I have – what I am reminded everyday by my nephew’s smile and the random picture with no context from my cousin and the text containing only emojis from my dad – is a loving family who do not forget about me, even though I am thousands and thousands of miles away from them. What I have, is that all of us are still alive, and maybe, maybe, that is enough for me to beat the COVID blue.