Yesterday, four days into confinement I received my first visitor, my mother. You don't have water, she noted. Oh it's fine, it's on purpose. She eyed at me suspiciously. Then she begun informing me about the latest news on the virus and family gossip. I had to stop her because this barrage of information was jarring after my four days of silence.
Later in the day she slipped out without me noticing and came back hours later in a taxi, carrying groceries and six liters of water.
--"Mom, thank you so much, but you're disrupting my project".
--"What do you mean, what's your project darling?"
--"It's difficult to explain, imagine that things were truly bad and we had to be entirely self-reliant, I want a taste of that".
--"So you're preparing for the worst? It's not that bad".
--"No, I don't think things will get bad, but it's surely useful to camp in remote places and it's a spiritual exercise of sorts.
Mother was surprisingly unsurprised. We agreed that, for the duration of my quarantine, she would visit one day per week, and that I would need to make some exceptions in order to fullfil social obligations. Fair enough.
I don't know where this leads, but the last few days have felt like a camino of sorts: I do physical labour all day long, I only check my phone twice a day, I eat copious amounts of food, and I lead a simple, secluded life. Mother's visit served as a checkpoint of sorts, bringing a whiff of the external world. It seems the external world doesn't need me, and I don't need it either.
Let us continue exploring within.