Spinning

Jane knew it must be either December or June, because she clearly remembered someone talking about yesterday being the solstice. Not someone she was actually talking to, but a person on television, probably. Or it could have been the delivery person from the Thai place down the street.

Jane concluded that it couldn’t be the winter solstice, because she totally would have noticed if it was cold outside. Not that she had been outside in the past three months, or possibly four months, with each day being just like the last one. Jane had been keeping tabs on the world around her through her living room window, stealing glances beyond parted curtains.

She then remembered that she had seen leaves on the trees, so triumphantly concluded that it was June! This small victory in seasonal identification was soon replaced by the nagging acknowledgement that Jane hadn’t even thought about going outside for at least a week, and only then because she had run out of milk. Halfway to the door, she decided she didn’t need milk anyway after diagnosing herself as lactose intolerant. Problem solved.

Jane used to spend her days bantering with her colleagues at Beyond Botox. They never missed a chance to make fun of the next self-absorbed divorcee who came into the office for some filler, or maybe a little Botox. This, without realizing the irony of the fact that each of them was under thirty and already thoroughly addicted to these manifestations of collective shallowness.

After work, Jane and her friends would eagerly make their way to the latest hipster bar or pop-up restaurant to blow off steam and occasionally hook up with random strangers. Because, really, why the hell not? Life was good, they were young, and they had no idea how ordinary they actually were.

Jane had been laid off a month ago, as people suddenly weren’t so interested in cosmetic procedures once they could hide behind their masks. In the beginning, she kept busy with virtual cocktail hours or socially distanced meet ups at parks she would never have gone to before. She continued to indulge in her elaborate makeup routine and hadn’t yet reached the point of resigning herself to pajama bottoms instead of pants.

Even more than missing her social life, Jane lamented that she couldn’t maintain her spin class routine. She had recently gotten over her hatred of bikes. This loathing was partially due to her embarrassment at never having learned to ride an actual bike, but really, if she was honest, it was because of her bizarre fear of the speeding bike messengers she often encountered during her short walk to work.

Several more months went by, and Jane no longer derived any satisfaction from seeing her friends, virtually or otherwise. They were running out of things to say to one another, their conversations never coalescing into any sort of meaningful interchange.

Jane began finding excuses not to meet up with her friends, feigning some activity that they all knew she wouldn’t possibly have been doing. Perhaps more concerning, she stopped driving her car when she noticed her heart pounding and palms sweating as she merged onto the freeway. This from someone who used to be an Uber driver just because she loved driving throughout Boston, at all hours of the day, especially in traffic.

Jane told herself that her new interest in walking was practical, resulting from the fact that she no longer truly needed to go anywhere further than the coffee shop one block way. Before the world shut down, she had started telling people she was going to “be way more environmental”, so she rationalized that this was a good start.

Excuses aside, Jane knew a strange darkness had entered her life—it wasn’t the kind of darkness that kept her at up night, but instead brought with it a gradual slipping away from her previous self.

Jane ignored this feeling of losing her grip by immersing herself in books and movies. She descended deeper into the imagined reality of whichever fictional character she started following that week. Once she tired of living in some stranger’s world, Jane created routines to calm her restless mind. Starting with organizing all of her clothes in her closet by color, or deciding to throw away three square objects every day for a week, and then four round things the next. The items became a sculpture by her front door when the pile grew too large and Jane couldn’t find the nerve to walk down to the basement to throw it away.

Jane had always loved peanut M&M’s. She kept her cupboard fully stocked with bulk sized bags ever since moving out on her own five years ago. Last Christmas, her mother had mailed her a giant box filled with thirty two of these bags, not realizing the clairvoyance of this gesture.

The M&M’s became Jane’s bunker staple as she began the ritual of taking one M&M out each day, placing it into a bowl as her way of counting the days since she hadn’t left her apartment. Jane selected certain colors depending on her mood, or decided to mix it up by choosing red if someone on TV said the word “pandemic”. She ran out of red M&M’s so switched to yellow, then brown, and finally, orange.

One day as Jane was counting the M&M’s she had placed in the bowl, she felt a compulsion to line them up against the backsplash of her kitchen counter. When she ran out of space in the kitchen, she continued the trail into the bathroom, the hallway, and eventually her bedroom. When they would occasionally roll off whatever surface they were on, Jane replaced them and didn’t bother to pick them up off the floor.

Her apartment became a chaotic maze of brightly colored reminders of each day that represented nothing.

Jane started watching the news for hours at a time, finding herself drawn in by the protests, tragedies, arguing commentators, and eventually, stories of recovery. Despite her fascination, she couldn’t bring herself to feel much of anything. Jane considered this ambivalence and for a short time, entertained the idea that perhaps this lack of empathy was a character flaw. Dismissing this thought, Jane came to accept that feeling strong emotions for anyone else was not in her wheelhouse.

She knew this probably made her somewhat of an asshole, and failed to realize that her friends already knew this about her. Jane remained steadfast in her belief that they found this quality to be charming.

What actually made Jane more than somewhat of an asshole was her foray into stealing her neighbor’s takeout orders. She knew that Sam, who lived two doors down, struggled with insomnia. This caused him to fall asleep at weird times during the day. She discovered by looking through her peephole that food would sit in front of Sam’s door for hours after its delivery, presumably because he had fallen asleep. Jane rationalized that he wasn’t really that hungry if he waited that long to even realize it was there. Plus, he was on the heavy side so she felt a sense of pride in the fact that she was helping him lose weight (no matter that he had never professed any such goal to her). At that moment, she felt an urge to call her friend Lia, who would have applauded Jane for her public service.

But by then Jane had stopped answering her phone, much less initiating calls. She instead was satisfied listening to her friends’ predictable stories they left on her voicemail. Soon the voicemails stopped, and not long after, the texts. Social media accounts went unchecked, eventually deactivated. Jane knew she was spiraling away from herself, yet she allowed the free fall. It was like she was living in some parallel universe where the world had just stopped spinning. And she seemed to be coasting toward a full stop.

Unfazed by her self-imposed social isolation, Jane took on an additional project, counting the tiles in her bathroom. Moving next to counting the tiles in the kitchen because she couldn’t stop on an even number. Jane also needed to make sure that all of the objects on her counter were lined up facing the same way. Pictures needed straightening each day, and a certain number of steps were required to travel between rooms of her apartment, depending on whether that particular day of the week had an “r” in it.

And yet, the world did eventually start spinning again.

Jane recognized the shift as she looked out her window and saw the steadily increasing flow of traffic and heard the return of laughter echoing in the space between buildings. Completely indifferent, Jane instead pondered her nails and wondered if it might be time to paint them. She assessed and concluded nope, definitely not ready to jump back into the world. She still wasn’t even sure exactly what day it was or why that mattered.

Jane sat at her window over the coming weeks and watched the world gaining speed in its return to life. She noticed that her apartment building was once again quiet during the day, its occupants out in the world, leaving her behind to wait. Jane felt comforted by this, as if everyone else was testing the waters for her and would let her know when it was safe to come out. For now, she was comfortable with other people navigating for her.

On a Tuesday in March, Jane realized that she had stopped setting aside M&M’s, and surprised herself by deciding to throw away the discarded object sculpture that occupied her entryway. She remembered to charge her cell phone for the first time in weeks. Once it was powered back on, Jane saw that she had missed a few calls from her boss at Beyond Botox, and wondered if it was a call back to work. She eventually called her boss back and despite her comfortable exile from the world, found herself agreeing to return to work the following Monday.

Over the next few days, Jane reactivated her social media accounts and sent a few texts to her friends, letting them know she was in fact still alive. She applauded herself for remembering to call her mom to check on her, and without guilt admitted to herself that her call would probably lead to a nice deposit into her Venmo account (thanks Mom). Jane scrubbed her floors and took some rotting food down to the garbage, proud that she had made two trips to the basement in one day. When she called and made an appointment to get her brows done, she knew she was ready to roll back into the world.

That Monday morning, Jane painstakingly applied her makeup as she regarded her eyebrows with approval. She was shocked that her pants were tight in the waist, but trusted that her spin classes would fix that situation. Jane was transforming into her old self, and looked back on the past months as something between a hallucination and a confusing nightmare. Self-reflection was not something that Jane indulged in, so the memory of these past months would likely fade, only to get filed away as some vaguely lonely time in her life.

She took one last look around her apartment as she grabbed her jacket, making a mental note to open some windows when she got home—it was still a little ripe in there.

Jane stepped onto the sidewalk, taking in the scent of the magnolia trees in bloom. She gazed down the street as she crossed toward Urban Roasters, coffee tumbler in hand (further evidence to Jane that she was in fact an environmentalist). Jane reveled in the feel of the sun on her face and strode confidently ahead as she abruptly felt a powerful jolt from behind. She was knocked to the ground as she heard the sound of her metal coffee mug crashing down beneath her.

Just as Jane was rolling back into the world, the speeding bike messenger took her out of orbit.