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ABOUT THE BOOK

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Novelist Rebecca Rosenblum lives in St. James Town, Toronto — the most densely populated square kilometre in all of Canada. When the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns arrive, she’s cut off from colleagues, friends, and family, and not allowed to go near neighbours. As the world constricts, Rebecca keeps a weird and worried diary online — a love letter both to the outside world that she misses so desperately, and the little world inside St. James Town that she can see from home.

As Rebecca watches and wonders from inside her box in the sky, her diary entries mix an account of a tough time in a tough place with joyful goofiness and moments of unexpected compassion.

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Introduction

My greatest fear is somehow getting unstuck from the earth and floating away, all alone, and no one knows where I am until I’m too far away to find. This sounds like a metaphor, and it is, but not entirely. I’ve done some drifting occasionally, and I don’t like it. Being woven in tight to Earth, to people and communities, is my thing. Sometimes, I feel that fear of floating away if I’m somewhere unusual where I don’t know anyone — somewhere no one would look for me. As I walk down an unfamiliar sidewalk to a new doctor’s office, or stand in the terminal during an unscheduled layover, that sensation of being unfindable makes me pull out my phone and open my contacts list. Being able to talk to friends, family, co-workers, to offer and receive help, to have a friendly chat about literally anything — current events or where to find cheap vegetables or why we used to love that weird old song ten years ago — makes me feel anchored and real, like I am a part of real life and could never just float away. Other people are my favourite part of being a person.

So, in many ways, the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic was my worst nightmare, not just because of the disease itself, although of course I worry plenty about that — I’m very lucky with my health, and the health of those I love, and my anxiety doesn’t usually operate on that vector. I was scared of illness, of course, but what mainly scared me was what I would do without everybody else during lockdown. There were rules to follow to keep yourself safe, and while the ever-shifting nature of the rules made their utility seem kinda farcical, I felt soothed in exactly the way I was meant to, by sanitizing my doorknobs and microwaving the mail. But no one offered a rule for how to feel like a part of society when I had to stand six feet away from it all. There was precious little soothing in the news about how to stay connected and sane and happy, if your happiness came primarily from other people.

I mean, I could see a lot of people, out there, through the windows. I live in the most densely populated neighbourhood in Canada, at least according to the most recent census data I could find. In 2016, there were at least eighteen thousand people living in the neighbourhood of St. James Town, Toronto, Canada, and probably a lot more now (several large residential towers have been built since that census) in about one square kilometre east of downtown, west of Parliament, between Bloor and Wellesley. My apartment complex alone houses approximately six thousand people in half a block, on a single side of the street.

(The town I grew up in had three thousand people for most of the time I lived there, and the road I lived on was out of town, such as it was — never able to get cable TV, proper internet, or sewers because the houses were too far apart. For some perspective.)

Of course, I’m a writer, and I’m married to another writer, and we have two cats — all indoor creatures who are supposed to be fine with staying home and staring out windows all day every day. But I’m also a publishing professional and my husband is a comms guy and the cats were used to us leaving them to their windows ten or twelve hours a day, before and after all the writing and staring. And then we stopped doing that, and we were all just … here … together … alone.

Before the pandemic, my husband and I didn’t really know most of our neighbours — we never really fit in here. St. James Town is famous for being a “landing pad” for new immigrants, including refugees from a number of war zones, which we hadn’t exactly realized before we moved here. There are also many students, young families, and people struggling in assorted ways. In the hallways I hear Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, occasionally French — often I’m not sure what I’m hearing. There are big parties in the park across the street that I can never understand — are they organized by some official body, or do people just start showing up, and then more come, until there are a hundred people in the park, eating off paper plates and playing club music? I’ve certainly never been invited. Behind the trees in the park where the parties happen, people used to play basketball all through the day and all night until one day, about eight years after it was built and three years after someone was shot there, the basketball court was torn down. (At the very end of my editing this book, after nearly two years of demolition, construction, and constant noise, the basketball court was mysteriously rebuilt, more or less exactly as it was before.)

I don’t fit in in St. James Town, but I didn’t exactly fit in in my small town, either, and both places were my home. You smile at your neighbours, you return misdelivered mail, you admire dogs and babies, you keep your TV at a reasonable level, you don’t say too much to people you don’t know too well. I’ve been happy in St. James Town, but also, pre-pandemic, I commuted to work forty hours a week, travelled regularly, and had lots of friends to visit and events to attend throughout the city. It was a good home base for me, but I didn’t think that much about it. Then the pandemic happened. And here became all there was.

Well, also my husband; also the inside of my head. Also the internet, and my cats, and the people who still talk on the phone. And that’s it. Without a yard or a driveway, neighbours I knew, or a brain that could tolerate breaking the rules, that was it for the months and months of endless lockdowns in Toronto. I stopped

Rebecca Rosenblum

going to work every day and talking to my beloved colleagues about copy- editing rules, I stopped taking the subway and the bus every day and observing all my fellow commuters, I stopped going to parties and having joyful party conversations, I stopped chatting with strangers in line at the supermarket (although I still went to the supermarket — it is very tricky to get things delivered to my building). No more volunteer work and our noisy, friendly meetings; no more dinners out with pals; no more family potlucks. Introverts crowed about finally dodging all these things they’d never liked, and I mourned — even the subway, even the grocery chats. Every connection lost was something that had anchored me to the world and although I had never felt more stuck, I also felt in cataclysmic danger of drifting away forever.

This book is a selection of transmissions I sent out from my satellite, trying to connect back to Earth. I started out just posting “hello” to friends on social media, same as always, but with a little more urgency, since it was now my only way to greet them. And then I started counting the days, thinking it was going to be a very small, finite number of them. As the two-week lockdown that the government originally forecast turned out to be longer, the posts got longer, too — designed both to give myself a little daily task and to engage people, ideally brighten my days and others’ too, and give us all something to think about besides lurking germs, handwashing protocols, hospital occupancy, and cordoned- off parks. I wanted people to talk to me, so I kept starting conversations — about the pando, sure, but about anything I could think of: my daily walks, my husband, my cats, my memories of childhood, anything I read or watched or ate or thought about. I wrote about the news, the weather, and the traffic I could see from my window. I wrote about things I had done in the past that now, in this time of reflection, I realized I regretted. I wrote about things other people had written in the comments on the previous day’s post.

I’ve always been a Fairly Online Person, but I have energy enough for Online and Real Life both. Deprived of a path, all my real-life energy went online and exploded into thousands of words of content and answers to every comment anyone was kind enough to offer — and I got so many. I will never stop being grateful to the friends and associates who engaged with me through these posts and kept me tethered to Earth during the first two years of Covid times. This book reproduces only my side of the conversation, but it was all written, originally, for an audience of a few hundred pals and associates. Together we kept it together in the weirdest times. This is how we did it.