What has happened? If I had stepped out of the door after just having woken up from a two months’ sleep, I would not have known there was a pandemic going on. The supermarket was as crowded as before, there was a queue outside the café, there were too many people outside the station. Have I woken up in an alternate reality? Maybe I am not even awake.
The lockdown going on around the world, reports in the press – and then outside the window, to the eye everything is as usual. I try to lead a normal life too. Indoors. I clean, wash, cook and just go outside when there is a need to (which by the way is very good for my allergy). But I miss the feeling of walking happily down the street, feeling the soft spring air, smiling at my wife. The streets look the same, but the happiness is gone.
Of course not everything is the same if I look closely. The bakery that normally always displays the bread and pastries wide open for every passerby to sneeze and cough on, has now started to sell bread in plastic bags and the pastries are behind protective sheets of plastic foil. Even the man at the cheese shop, who normally never wears a mask, has started to wear one. At the grocery store I see people wearing plastic bags, normally used for potatoes and carrots and onions, on their hands. And the pasta and noodle shelves are almost empty.
Some people appear to be careful, worrying about the virus, but many do not seem to care at all, sneezing and coughing without covering their faces, touching far too many tomatoes and cucumbers in order to select the perfect ones to buy, and generally appearing quite unconcerned. I try to avoid them the best I can, taking the long way around to go and see if today is the lucky day, if today there is toilet paper to be found.
Maybe this is the new way now, but I hope not, I hope life will return to normal eventually, that I will be happily walking down the street holding my wife’s hand. I hope life will return to normal. Well, except for the pastries; I do not know how many times I have told my wife that I cannot understand how they can display uncovered coffee bread in the middle of one of the most busy passage ways in the whole department store. So if protected pastries become the way of life I am very happy (even though we almost never buy them, but it is the principle I tell my wife; the principle).
And by the way – wow, today at the store I managed to coincide with the toilet paper delivery, so now we are ok for a while.
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