I have been stirring my coffee for exactly four minutes now. I’ve outlined clockwise turns followed by three counterclockwise swirls, a star motion, and a lemniscate. In college we’ve been told the importance of creating multiple axes for an efficient diffusion of coffee and heat. University physics and logic hinted us that it is inefficient to mix brew in a whirlwind because that only creates a single axis.
It’s 8:30AM on a Saturday, day 35 of the enhanced community quarantine in my city as a measure to contain the coronavirus. I could still be sleeping in my bed. I could be preparing for my Masters scholarship interview application that’s been postponed twice already. But instead, I find myself making coffee while reading on the internet ways to keep oneself out of a pandemic limbo. If we were in another situation, this melancholy could have been dealt with many things outdoors. But staying indoors seems to be the first sensible solution in the meantime.
I stood up and lifted the saucepan’s lid to keep the macaroni soup from spilling. With a ladle in hand I stirred the pot gently, imitating the way I stirred the brewed coffee, also concluding with the figure for infinity. Besides my laptop and phone, the stove has been the most active item in this residence as I found cooking therapeutic. As I stand before the stove with a ladle in hand, I think about the many others in this city who didn’t have soup to stir. Households of varying privilege surely have defined what therapy looked, felt, tasted like. In this time of crisis, many of us have understood the real meaning of being in a rut depending on who we’re with, the kind of soup we eat, and the hours of sleep we’re only allowed to have.
What’s scary is that we seem to have been minimised to whether we are still allowed to continue our businesses. We don’t think about it often, but the new normal could be this.
I put the flame off and let the residual heat cook the noodles through. I would have to wait for 10AM to eat so the meal would cover breakfast and lunch, meanwhile I looked at the to-do list I put up in my journal. Funny that for some of us, myself included, time is now nothing more than a marker, a reminder that tomorrow is day 36 of a seemingly indefinite vortex of a quarantine.#
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