Today marks the end of the sixth week that I have been writing this blog series. Six weeks! That is six weeks of spending 23 and a half hours a day inside my apartment, six weeks of having physical contact with only my wife, six weeks of sweatpants, and trips to the supermarket that feel like heists, and yoga in the morning, and working from my dining table, and social isolation. 

Only it hasn’t felt overtly isolating. Some of that is because we live in the future where I can literally talk to my magic handheld computer and instruct it to let me view and speak to my brother and it does! But another big part is because of this, what you’re reading right now, these words, this act of writing. 

Because, while technology is definitely an act of magic and I’m sure my laptop is just full of tiny wizards making it all work, there is an older magic at play here. Writing is magic and reading is magic. I sit here alone in my room in Vienna and put down a string of words to represent a ridiculous thought I’ve had, maybe about how Austrians like to scream “meal time!” at each other, or how an old tortilla will do if you’re out of toilet paper, or how my wife wants to stab people with a fork from time to time, and I express these images through a series of squiggles, and then you in your home maybe a thousand miles away from mine open up a page and decipher these squiggles until you too are picturing screaming Austrians, or sanitary tortillas, or a fork-wielding Alex. We have communicated, from my mind to yours. Magic.

Writing this blog and having this magical communication has helped me tremendously during this surreal and abstract, and any other art movement that applies (expressionist?), time. I have been able to funnel my anxiety and nervous energy, my questions and thoughts and actions and stupid jokes into this medium, and by doing so get them out of my head where they can breathe a little, see the sun a little, and not feel all pent up inside my skull where they would endlessly bounce around (much as I image kids are doing during this quarantine. Those poor, poor parents). 

Writing is a crystallising process. Putting words down forces me to reach into the fog of fragmented thoughts and hazy half ideas and decide how I really think and feel about a thing, to put it into a sentence that I can read back on and think “Oh yeah, that’s how it is”. And because I have formed it into a single clear statement, it’s as if I have permission to stop chewing over it, to let it go, to know it’s there if I need it, in black and white, and move on feeling a little lighter because of it. Magic.

As I have been doing this process for the past six weeks, the good/bad news (depending on if you’ve enjoyed these blogs or not, and if not, nobody made you keep reading them, that’s on you, friend) is that I have nothing left to say. All current concerns and questions, quibbles and queries about life in the time of COVID have been expunged onto the page and shared and communicated with you lovely people. The brain tank is currently clean and empty, and ready to be refilled. 

To all those who have read along, my deepest thanks goes out to you for taking this time to be with me, to communicate with me, for keeping me company and removing some of the isolation from my social isolation. These have been and continue to be strange times, but I am incredibly proud of how we as a community are getting through it together even while being forced to remain apart. That is another kind of magic.

I am sure there is more weirdness to come, more challenges and more adaptation, and so I’m sure it won’t be long until new perspectives and observations and silly jokes begin circling in my head, needing to be written down and shared with all of you. As such, this is not goodbye, instead let me just say, as is said in German, auf Wiedersehen (literal translation = on seeing again. I told you that language was literal!).

Until next time.