Beasts Who Don't Wander
From the calm and beautiful waters of New Zealand, Corey and I flew in opposite directions for plans to see various friends and family: Me to Berlin via Turkey and Corey to Washington, DC via Los Angeles. I know, it sounds like we were crazy and/or crazily irresponsible human beings doing all this travel, but we were all really living in a different reality at the time, even though I find it hard to recall the state of the world and my state of mind prior to the coronavirus at this moment. I think at that point, there were only cases in China, Japan and South Korea.
Things were going okay initially, with me seeing my parents in Istanbul and then staying with friends in Berlin, and Corey seeing Abe & Liz in Los Angeles and dropping into Washington, DC to join family for his nephew’s first birthday. Then the coronavirus cases started increasing rapidly in both Europe and the US. Statements like “oh that would never happen in the next two weeks” were upended the next day when things we thought were impossible happened overnight and without notice - with flights being cancelled and borders being closed. We were both extremely lucky to have been able to change our flights to earlier dates to meet in Istanbul without incident and harrowing airport waits. Flying to Istanbul, I pulled up the excel sheet we use to plan our year-off. For the months of March / April, Corey had already updated it by cancelling our plans in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi, and marking the whole chunk of time “ZOMBIE VIRUS.” Sense of humor is much appreciated during pandemics.
Currently, we are on Day 4 of sitting in our Cihangir apartment, only going out for outdoor runs and the supermarket. We plan to be hunkered down here at least until the end of April. We are still talking about what happens in May, in June (things are changing so rapidly, making it impossible to plan), and how this whole pandemic plays out and ends with some signal, some normalcy. It won’t end so cleanly? Or only with a new normalcy? Probably.
We are very used to living in the confined spaces of the Airstream trailer or the sailing boat just the two of us, but this feels quite different, with the internet and the news pouring anxiety into our little space. Luckily, I am also used to provisioning for certain periods of time without access to grocery shops. Though Corey says I might have overdone the cheese and the lemons this time (all the Turks will disagree I told him).
And Corey baked banana bread for us! Married five years and you can still be surprised. Let’s see what the next weeks bring out.
P.S. For those Turks who were wondering about its absence, the feta cheese, not pictured, was in a covered container in the fridge and did not fit in the photo op.
