May is traditionally full of days off in France – Labour Day, VE Day, Ascension, the 31 May deadline by which last year’s unused paid leave must be used up – making the month essentially one big long weekend. It’s somehow fitting that it’s now home, too, to the big Day On. 11 May: déconfinement.
As COVID-19 took its stranglehold in March, signs began appearing in shop and restaurant windows, often crookedly hand-lettered. Fermé jusqu’à nouvel ordre.
And although at the time it seemed Gallicly melodramatic, today does feel like it marks the arrival of the new order, the beginning of the end of confinement and the end of the beginning of the post-COVID world. As of 00:01 this morning, we can leave our homes without filling in a form, gather in groups of up to 10 people, travel up to 100km as the crow flies. These seem like exceptional liberties after nearly eight weeks at home. I text a friend, feeling breathless. Maybe next weekend we can go to the forest? She replies, Or even just a walk along the river. And I picture it with the same romanticised anticipation that a year ago I might have imagined a Cycladean beach: the long sweep of a bike path, the hair-ruffle of a gentle breeze, the unease of post-boat water.
It’s amazing how quickly just about anything can become normal. The beginning of the lockdown scared me, because it was all so unknown; now the end of it scares me almost as much. I tell my boss I’m in no hurry to come back to the office, and am secretly not sure I’ll ever do a full week without télétravail again. I’ve become accustomed to being able to start and finish later, play Dvořák all day without headphones, cook myself lunch, occasionally stop for a mid-afternoon dance session to relieve stress.
Having been in the immensely privileged position to be able to continue working full-time from home, and to go shopping once a week for more than I could possibly need to eat (and drink), I’ve leaned into confinement in the most cliched way possible. I’ve taken up yoga. I learned to play a song on the guitar, tried to study economics, cleaned out my wardrobe. I’ve spent entire blissful afternoons in bed with a book, often with my shirt rolled up and my window wide open so that the unseasonably warm sun could toast my soft winter belly. I’ve made numerous potato bakes, four loaves of bread, and – over many hours one memorable Saturday – 18 wonky but perfectly textured croissants.
I’ve shared breakfasts over Skype and wine over Whatsapp and I’ve reconnected with people I haven’t spoken to in years. The people I speak to often have been more present than ever, messaging, phoning, laughing, commiserating. We finally have a family group chat, filled with heart emojis and photos of chooks. Confined in Bretagne with her parents, my friend invites her father to our Thursday drinks and he tells us stories of sailing the world and youthful mischief. I begin to look forward to weekly instalments of Papa Jean-Marie almost more than anything else. Across Paris, another friend’s children clamber into view during a videocall; I swear they’ve grown in confinement.
I feel flashes guilt of how much beauty there is in all this, the staying in, the reaching out, my good fortune.
Having no one to share them with and no self-control, I ate all 18 of the croissants over a 24-hour period and then fell into a chasm of self-loathing. Spending hours a day in Zoom meetings and Whatsapp afterworks has kept me employed and connected but has also meant that I have seen more of my own face in two months than I had in perhaps the two preceding years, and had a lot of ugly thoughts about my appearance.
I’ve spent nights lying awake, heart pounding, worried about everything and nothing. One night at 11pm I packed a backpack and left it sitting by the door for a month, just in case coronavirus hit me hard and I had to get myself to hospital. I Googled how to get myself to hospital. Another night I thought about making a death box, a neat kit that would allow my family to clean up my French life with the least amount of administrative trauma in the case of my rapid demise. The loneliness that was constant but manageable before the pandemic overtook me from time to time, knocking me to the floor in a ball.
My friends are forced to delay their wedding by a year. Others are laid off, furloughed, have their hours cut or see their safety nets disappear altogether. People I know (and so many I don’t) are trying to navigate grief and funerals in a time of isolation. I am lucky, I tell myself over and over, staring at the ceiling. I am so lucky.
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A new manager has taken over the laundromat I frequent once a fortnight. I meet him for the first time on day 33, when a machine stalls mid-wash, holding my clothes hostage until I call for backup and he arrives, tall and curly-haired, optimistically dressed for summer in bare arms and thongs. He expertly defuses the situation, gives me a new wash and dry cycle for free, phones me an hour later to check we’ve all got home safely.
On the 11th, he is mopping the floors as I turn up to empty a dryer and waits patiently for me to traipse across the clean wet floor, offers to spot me another cycle if my clothes aren’t dry, checks I haven’t forgotten anything. Disconcerted by his kindness, I mispronounce my thanks and run for the door.
Scurrying home, I spot my next-door neighbour smoking with his friends outside the bar he runs underneath our building. After more than three and a half years of living five feet from one another we still share nothing more than a thankfully soundproof wall and the occasional bonjour on the stairs. I am overcome with a longing not to be invited to join their tiny deconfinement party but to have the social chutzpah to make it happen.
Back in the last months BC – Before Coronavirus – I felt like I was evolving, working some things out about my life and my purpose, what mattered and what didn’t, what needed to change. I was making some headway with my social anxiety, developing tactics to trick myself out of near-constant terror and into something approaching healthy interaction with strangers and acquaintances. After two months of next to no in-person interaction, it feels a bit like I’m starting from somewhere in the negatives again.
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In the two days before deconfinement, thunderstorms lash Paris, growling and flashing and soaking. Storms are so rare here that when the smell of ozone floods the city, people take to Twitter wondering, what’s going on? There’s a feeling we’re all just waiting for the next catastrophe, and it seems inevitable: the second wave, the economic downturn. Natural disaster?
But I find them strangely comforting, these Brisbanesque storms. We may be in the new normal, but some things feel the same. I sleep better than I have in weeks with the rain pounding on my windows.
The sun comes out of confinement with us on the 11th, and Paris gleams.
Here we go.