Lockdown lovers

We hooked up at University. We’d always stayed in touch from a distance and I always wondered about what might have been. 

We had been back in touch for a few months when lockdown happened and I found myself stranded not in the country or city I normally lived, but the city where he lived. The odd text in the months leading up to the pandemic turned into some late night phone calls that lasted hours. 

I had covid symptoms at the end of March. 5 weeks later I took an antibody test - it was positive. I’d done hours of research around immunity and by this point multiple reports confirmed it to exist, at least for a short time. We both lived alone and had been following strict social distancing. We decided to take a calculated risk and break lockdown. I cycled over an hour to get to his and this became the weekend routine. 

It goes without saying that a pandemic is a surreal and poignant time to be experiencing new - or in our case renewed - intimacy with someone. In the earlier days with anyone you are always so engrossed in each other, but the empty streets outside really did make it feel like we were the only two people in the world. Exploring our minds, exploring our bodies, coping together, listening to music, cooking, reading the news, chastising the government, hoping for a revolution, getting drunk. Our university years made it instantly so familiar, so warm, so comforting when some comfort was desperately needed. 

We both knew there was an end point, our closeness was to be fleeting. I would return to my city, in a different country, when restrictions lifted. Without needing to speak about it in any depth, we both knew we wanted it to be something that only existed in that moment. A little make believe relationship frozen in time with the world around it.

The new normal began and I went home. We spoke occasionally for a few weeks, and then stopped. It didn’t carry through into the new world; we left it behind. The creation of our little corner of the Earth at a time when it was still. Lockdown lovers.