We Are All Deaf During the Pandemic

WHEN COVID-19 BEGAN to jump borders in January 2020, I was in Munich on a writing fellowship. Germany’s first few cases were sent to Schwabing Hospital, not far from where I lived and worked. I didn’t think much of it, assuming that it would be contained – but two months later I was on a plane back to Australia, my plans for nine months of prestigious fellowships in Germany, Scotland and the US in ruins. My parents have a holiday house on the northern New South Wales coast where I could quarantine; if I returned to my partner in Brisbane, I ran the risk of infecting him. I decided to stay at the beach until I was clear.

For the first week, unable to get out of bed, I slept. With a sore throat and cold, I thought at first I had the virus – but without a car I couldn’t attend a fever clinic. I phoned a local doctor, who recommended I monitor my symptoms. Over the next few days they subsided, and I realised they’d been a reaction to stress. It had been a nightmare getting home when Qantas cancelled my flight without notification. I pulled an all-nighter to find and catch another flight the next morning. The skin between my fingers cracked from too much hand-washing on the plane. It stung when I poured sanitiser onto it.

In the second week I dragged myself to the kitchen table to meet a deadline. Between paragraphs I took in my limited view. I looked out to the neighbour’s golden rain tree, yellow flowers falling over the fence. I saw a fruiting beehive ginger plant nestled in the long grass, the flower of red overlapping cones striking against its spiky leaves. Slowly, where I was became familiar: not so much the view from the table but a pattern, a way of being in this strange, quiet world. I had, after all, been in isolation for most of my life.

Read the rest of this piece online at Griffith Review. This essay was funded by the Judith Neilsen Institute.