Lockdown Timelines

It's eight months since the world ended, and we've fucked up our sleep schedules so badly that sometimes it feels as though we're living in an entirely different dimension

from the reality we've always known and

from one another.

We sip on morning coffee at 7p.m., when we believe the outside world is thinking about bed.

We rarely eat meals together, but when we do it's dinner and it's four o'clock in the morning and nothing half-decent is open. You order a chicken sandwich. I take whatever salad the fast-food chain can make happen.

The numbers on the clocks are meaningless and fleeting. They repeat, over and over again in different combinations. They tick away, eating at our time like ants carrying morsels back to sandy little anthill homes: it goes slowly, so that we barely realise anything is wrong until it's one of our birthdays and we're older now but with nothing to show for it. We've done nothing better than rot in your apartment while the poison in the bodies outside insists we stop living our lives.

We keep the blackout curtains closed because it's so cold and there's only dimness through the days anyway and - would it matter either way?

These habits become avoidant:

you care about societal constructs and start shifting toward more acceptable hours. Your days awake are spent inaccessible, at the desktop with headphones on and an expression that insists you think this cycle never ends.

I become avoidant

(resentful):

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling with the cat at my feet because he's better company. I pretend to be sleeping anytime you pass, rise from the mattress with a stretch when you come to join me. I spend my waking hours with fingers moving deftly across a laptop.

You never ask what I am writing.

Even after I leave and your head buzzes angrily with a lack of answers,

you do not ask to read.