The Best Wifi is in our Closet, from the “Love in the Time of Corona” a Corona Diaries series of Morning Pages entries.

The best wifi is in our closet and that’s funny because I have to spend so much time now in our closet and look at what I usually hide.

Listen to Cat read this essay on Spotify

I can’t write as usual.

I start and stop. I’m angry and there are birds making sounds. If I look around, everything is ok for them: the trees are just standing there, the air stands still and the birds can’t stop talking. Inside my skin is roaring and I want to rip our pictures off the walls.

Yesterday I thought this was all a mistake. My choosing to stay here instead of going home to Bali. I have searched for home all my life. When I was 3 and 4 I had recurring dreams of being emaciated and dirty and wandering through different portals and times looking for my mother to hold me, looking for a place to rest. I won’t forget those dreams. Some dreams are the brain’s vomit and some hold sparkles and truth. In 2006 I had a dream that the whole world closed down.

So many of us aren’t surprised by what’s happening now, in some ways we’ve been preparing but what we haven’t been prepared for is the shock of stopping. Of our own fears creeping in. I know now more than ever it’s not the time to fly, I must stay and be kind.

I am in pain. We are in pain.

This is not the time for masks and pretending. You and I are fighting every day and I have gone back into my dreams of leaving. I almost leave. I pull on my boots and walk furiously, just me and the air and my skin and my boots. Usually it’s dark when I do this. Last night there were no stars and I walked in the dark, pure dark no lights. I felt a comfort. I can handle this darkness, I realized and, if I stay a little longer, I can see in this dark.

I know this isn’t the time to leave. That we’ve been perfectly placed where we all are. That growth and birth doesn’t come from comfort, that it’s the friction and tension that makes sparks, that a greater fire is brewing and this explosion will bring forth new wings. We are burning into ashes and have to become comfortable with the space of nothing before our new beaks and claws emerge.

My habit is to run and I am so angry that’s taken away.

I have to tell you I’m sorry and see where I hurt you and tell you when you hurt me. My demons are eating me and I don’t have words when we fight. There’s a part of me who wants to push you away forever but that’s just me and my madness. I don’t have space to elegantly cover it.

The best wifi is in our closet and that’s funny because I have to spend so much time now in our closet and look at what I usually hide. I need to start folding better and maybe I just need to be okay with the parts of me that are a mess. I am currently a tangled rainbow.

Our nights are stormy and yet at the edge of sleep we still pull one another into bed and hold ourselves together under the sheets. We sleep through the night, our dreams clashing and swooning, and when we wake we kiss with our morning breath and say, “I love you” and I think we mean it. The passion we have isn’t a usual passion, it pierces and there’s no place to hide.

But we chose this to be our magic portal for this time being, to be stuck together and to learn to take care of one another.

I’m sliding around in these lessons and I am new at these dance steps. Hopefully we can be kind in our awkwardness and forgiving of our toe stepping (slamming). Maybe you find me in the closet fumbling with my tangled rainbow and, as you do, you kneel down and help me fold. And somehow in this chaos we are a perfect complement. And I remember when we hug that we can say “sorry” and mean it. In every world ending, there’s a world beginning. We’re in this together.

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Curious how Cat is handling her own self quarantine, stuck together with her boyfriend, hiding out in their closet?

Read more corona diaries morning pages entries in “Love in the Time of Corona”
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