Introduction to the Inaccessible.

I am sitting in a bed in an apartment that isn’t mine. My head only knows one place to go and that is into the depths of my body, it is its own ekg, oxi-monitor, and pulse sensor. All of it comes built in, but they have been calibrated through five weeks of syncing with their electric counterparts, as I sought to determine whether it was Covid-19 or anxiety. 

Even now as I write this, I am measuring my breaths against the stroke of the keyboard. Do I hold my breath as I write? Does my heart beat to the rhythm of the apple keyboard and palpitate when its butterfly keys stick, or is it strictly married to whatever is inside me? Whatever the physicality I exist in, it doesn’t matter. I am here in an unknown place. We relocated here over three weeks ago, after Emily’s apartment was requested by her roommate for a week. We fled to a friend’s apartment who had fled weeks earlier to Vermont. 

Originally, as we viewed their exodus through Instagram, we were jealous that they escaped hell. Later, as we moved the two bags of clothes and a computer workstation that our lives had been reduced to up their four flights of stairs, we were eternally grateful. It was in that moment of transplant that the world ceased to exist. It digitized, becoming only accessed through glimpses of others, through video chats and teleconferences with doctor’s offices. 

The moments I do get out are in panic. They are to places labeled either urgent or emergency and are stationed with people fearful of being next to me. Of being next.

My home is abandoned. It sits there in the Upper Westside where the neighbor who drove me away still resides. She is now alone to use the shared bathroom at her disposal. She is alone, I am isolated, you are distanced, others are quarantined. We have shed place and become thoroughly nowhere.

In my case, place has shrunken to maybe 80 square feet and its adjoining bathroom in Bedstuy Brooklyn. The apartment is on the street where Biggie Smalls' portrait marks the corner of the block and the building itself is nondescript, new and uninterested in matching the character of its neighbor. My room, Zach and Nancy’s room, faces an interior court that is more suburban and has more trees than I would have imagined from the front. 

I am not immune to confined spaces, my apartment itself is one, its 132 square feet. The mind can expand the smallest space, magnifying details that were invisible before. The seafoam tone of the masked light on the air conditioner. The tree out the window where all the birds in the neighborhood fuck. I could do that for you. I could describe the intimacy of every detail, but the countless folds in the duvet cover do not deserve it. They sat there unwillingly to accept my sweat and chills during the night. They are cureless

My cure is in putting my mind back where it belongs, in the open, in space rather than its vacuum. The plan is to tell you stories of places that exist but I can’t get to. They are places that I will imagine, but are real. They are places that I will Google, but will not taste smell or see them. You will experience these places, through how I experience everything now, a conjuring. These stories will be a travel guide out of your inner confines and into an inaccessible world. Our landlord, the virus, has requisitioned our permits of place and free travel. This is an effort to take them back. 

Stay with me. Let’s see how this goes and don’t worry I’ll keep you at a distance.

My SpO2 is 97% my PRbpm is 77.