Recently, I’ve started to become sick of words. Maybe this is ironic, considering the volume that I write normally. Still, this period, which I initially thought (selfishly? stupidly?) would be wonderful for my creativity, has been something of a dry spell for me. Honestly, there’s nothing new to say; I wake up, I make coffee, I watch TikToks, I might do some work, I eat, I might walk my dog, I go to bed, and I repeat. This is not, as one might assume, attributable to the stress of proximity to staggering amounts of death—anxiety isn’t a new feeling for me. I think it’s because writing seems kind of pointless right now. I write things for a reason, usually to make an argument (even if I’d like to frame it as something else). Right now, it feels like the only thing worth writing about is the pandemic, or something that matches its scale; anything else would be insensitive. At the same time, what is there to say about coronavirus, really? How do you comment on the current situation when everything is in flux? Is there a fact-based argument to be made when nobody knows what’s going on?

I think any desire to say something smart about the meaning of this would probably just be a denial of the Absurd, or at least the absurdity of Now. I started reading existentialist philosophy in high school, which I think was less reflective of my intelligence than my pretensions. As much as I could claim to understand Camus, I don’t think I truly got it until coronavirus—basically that sometimes, bad things just happen and there’s not much you can do about it. You can distribute blame or remain in denial, but that won’t change your inability to escape that fact. This might be a long way of saying that, like everybody else, I’ve been reading The Plague in quarantine.

I don’t think that this philosophy should be depressing, though I recognize that it’s contradictory to the ways that many of us (including me!!) are used to thinking about tragedy. In our minds, disaster is a conflict where someone is the aggressor and someone is the victim. In most cases this binary is overly-simplistic anyway, but it’s especially difficult to apply to a virus, which isn’t even alive. Conspiracy theories blaming China or Russia for creating this disease in a lab might be comforting, but ignore the truth. Coronavirus doesn’t kill people because it wants to see us suffer. It’s just what a virus is. As epidemiologists have been warning us, eventually one will mutate to be the right combination of infectious and deadly that it becomes a pandemic. Basically, this is not war; it’s statistics.

I’ve been having a hard time dealing with this, honestly. Sometimes, it feels like part of my life is being stolen from me, and that hurts. Knowing that there’s (probably) not a malevolent force doing this helps a little, but it doesn’t relieve the day-to-day frustrations of quarantine. I may have accepted this pandemic intellectually, but I haven’t internalized that acceptance, at least not yet. I know I’ll adapt, as all humans do. But that day hasn’t come yet.