Ready or not, here we come!

The pandemic isn't technically over yet, but outdoor is where we are. (Representational image: Daoudi Aissa via Unsplash)

Now that Covid has faked its own death, everyone is leaving on a jet plane. We are rushing out to meet family and friends, acquaintances and neighbours. We are throwing out old shoes, and investing in fashionable footwear. We are holding hands and kissing cheeks. Coffeeshops are packed, hotels fully booked. Sunshine has upped its price, but we are willing to pay! Outdoor is where we are.

There has been no dramatic announcement from the WHO, but the human race is all about hope. And short-term memory loss. It’s like we had been locked in a zoo and someone just left our cage open. We don’t know whether to turn left or right, walk or run…

No one can pretend the pandemic has been a picnic. There is trauma stored in our DNA now, in our blood and bone. This loud bonhomie and donning of party hat is meant to overwrite the recent stress, the losses, the brush with mortality. While we are, understandably, wishing away recent events, we are not yet immune to the aftereffects. We have seen nothing like it before, and hold no roadmap out of this maze. Still, with fingers crossed, we enthusiastically make plans, mainly travel plans.

Changes include addiction to online ordering and OTT entertainment. One doesn’t step out to buy milk or go see a film in a theatre anymore. Tourism brochures have been replaced with website clicks. But by and large, we are asking the world to flashback, to take us back to where it left us roughly two years ago. And after all that hurried socialising, after all that eating out, after all that walking carelessly alongside strangers... now what?

Yes, it is a thrill to see faces once again. Masks had taken away that unconscious enjoyment we took in just observing the many people we saw every day. But now that we have been out and about without mandatory masking, we are back to taking faces and people and outings for granted. What we missed so achingly during lockdowns, what we wrote so much bad poetry about, this freedom, did we romanticise it just a teeny bit?

A kind of global gaslighting has taken place. Or maybe it is Stockholm syndrome. Whatever it is, we have taken to cautioning others that Covid is not yet gone. We wear our mask in an act of common sense but also as virtue signalling: see, we are doing the right thing.

We are realising the truth about other people – we can do without them. The places we longed to see? All hype. Jetlag is a killer. Catching up with a cousin in a café is not what you thought it would be; he has your aunt’s habit of rambling. There’s an animalistic pleasure in being double-faced – coronavirus is evoked and coronavirus is pooh-poohed according to whim and fancy. Because there is this universal sense of a letdown after the passionate want and wait. If nothing else, Covid is providing us with perspective.