Do You Miss Lockdown?

Those were the days… or were they?

2020 started with the impeachment of Donald Trump, the first attempted presidential ousting since Clinton twenty-two years prior. A volcano in the Philippines erupted, killing thirty-nine and leaving many without homes. LA Lakers player Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna Maria-Onore died in a helicopter crash. A novel SARS virus infected the Chinese city of Wuhan, inciting a lockdown. I got fired from my dispensary job for forgetting to flush the toilet (because I got high). 

I’d have said nuclear war if you asked me how the world will end. I’d presuppose the annihilation of all creation without challenging my definitions of “end” and “world.” Nobody thought we would ride out a global catastrophe trapped in our apartments while the economy collapsed. We didn’t see it coming: lockdown, celebrity storytime, vaccine lotteries, millions dead, none of it. None of us were ready for COVID. 

Four years after COVID first arrived in the United States, the average person might look around and say little has changed. Sure some storefronts are still boarded up, and there aren’t as many bars and restaurants as there used to be. And yet, while almost everything looks the same as it did, to some, the difference is staggering. That’s because COVID’s impact was not defined by its presence but the string of pronounced absences left in its wake.

“I remember thinking, How long will this last? How bad will it be?”

I was struggling to name a feeling on my way to work the other night. Looking around at other riders keeping to themselves, it struck me how utterly gone pre-COVID SF is. I do not miss the tech industry and, unlike our mayor, I don’t want them back. What I miss is Han’s Coffee Shop up the hill from my place, their unbeatable French toast and kind, smiling owners. I miss drag nights at the original Stud. I miss the sweet old hippie couple who successfully managed my building for forty years before Gaetani forced them out. What I wanted was the old SF back. 

Hours later amid one of the biggest rushes my bar had seen since last year, I thought to myself: Remember when you made $1,600 a month doing nothing? Wasn’t that nice? Yes. Terrible but true. I was taking a breather for the fifth time because I forgot how demanding this could be and I stopped. Remember spending all day snuggled up to your partner watching The Sopranos and smoking weed? Lockdown sounds pretty good right now.

I knew people were suffering and dying at rates that surpassed 9/11 every day. It was easy to be selfish when you’re insulated by home. One unexpected effect on my mental health was the way it equalized the world and my anxiety. Suddenly all that catastrophizing I did wasn’t so out-there. For many people, this was their first significant trauma. I know this because they documented it all online. Good, I sat back and joked, good… (it was not good). 

Thinking of all the things I enjoyed while people around the planet were dying in record numbers made me feel guilty. On the bus ride home, I confronted my guilt and questioned its intentions. If I enjoyed myself even once during lockdown, does that invalidate every COVID casualty? I feel lucky to have been spared unprecedented loss during the pandemic’s heyday. I am also lucky to inhabit an able, breathing body, which is more than many can say. Eventually I realized it wasn’t guilt I was feeling but shame, shame that I had spent a huge chunk of my life trying to live day-to-day. Then one morning, it was all that was expected of me. At first, lockdown was a sigh of relief.

If you miss lockdown, you’re not alone.

Time slowed down in 2020. For some it stopped completely. The skies were free of air pollution. Spring flowers blossomed on all the fire escapes visible from my apartment. Songbirds returned to the Tenderloin. Mental health walks reminded me what a playground the city can be. The time at home together didn’t dissolve my partner and I’s relationship. People were freaking out about dolphins swimming in the cleared-up Venice canals. My savings were all wiped out by the time I received my first unemployment payment, but otherwise I appreciated this glimpse of life without capitalism. See, our government was holding out on us. Change isn’t all bad.

But the bad was abysmal, sometimes terrifying, looming in every cough and sneeze you heard. I remember how phobic I was at first, caught up in the craze of spritzing my soup cans with hand sanitizer. Then George Floyd was murdered. The United States plunged into racial turmoil while recognizing police forces nationwide as the killing machines they really are. People risked their lives marching in Floyd’s memory, demanding lasting justice. With COVID fatalities soaring and discriminatory hospital practices, it became doubly dangerous to be Black in America.

We did what we could to stay sane, even as fire began eating away at California’s parched pine forests. One morning in lockdown, my partner woke me: “You should see this.” We went over to the window and I couldn’t believe the color of the sky. An alien-orange glow over the abandoned skyscrapers of downtown SF seemingly made it official. This really was the end of the world. All we needed were trumpets and earthquakes. How long will this last, we worried? How bad will it be?

Smoke from the North Complex fire settles over San Francisco, turning the daytime sky a dark orange. Photo by Christopher Michel via Wikimedia Commons.

None of us were ready for COVID. 

My buoy in the storm was my studies—all online, of course. By the way, grad school over Zoom cost exactly the same as if I’d attended in the flesh. The morning of the fire, or Orange Day as social media came to call it, I emailed my professor. “Greetings from our Venusian hellscape. Is class still happening?” “‘Venusian hellscape!’” he wrote back. “That’s good. And yes, see you at 6PM.” 

My best and worst lockdown moments happened within minutes. After an exuberant class over Zoom, the kind that made me happy and grateful to study writing, I closed my laptop. My partner was already asleep. The afterglow from class was fading. Of course I felt robbed paying to study at home, but that wasn’t why my heart was breaking. I missed the camaraderie, the spontaneity of plans after class or work that took you somewhere you loved or hadn’t been. Tears streaming down my face, I wondered if we were ever going back. 

If you miss lockdown, you’re not alone. People were nicer then, even if it was because they may never see each other again. Sympathy was easier because no matter who you were, you feared the same things. We spoke with our friends more often because none of us were busy. Perhaps what you miss isn’t lockdown but rather what it brought and brought out in you, even at others’ expense.

We’re never going back. But we will go forward, into whatever future lies ahead. We will memorialize COVID as the darkest time in America since 9/11. It did not mean joy was nonexistent. While I’d gladly take another paid year off, I would never ask for another lockdown. That isn’t the answer to a stressful day on the job. When I’m nervously carrying a stack of pints taller than me, I’ll remember 2020. The chance to reflect on oneself and grow from it doesn’t depend on the world bending to the worst-case scenario. We saw what happened when it did.