Living in Amsterdam #4 – My First Month of Isolation

It was, by no means, the first Easter I’ve ever spent away from home. Last year, I chose to attend the Nuart Aberdeen Street Art Festival as opposed to flying back to Italy, and on several other Easter weekends before that, I just stayed where I was. This year I still wasn’t planning on buying an overpriced ticket to Rome, yet I couldn’t help but feel a bit homesick about spending Easter apart from my family.  

Whenever I wish to look at the bright side of the coronavirus outbreak, I think about the close friends and family I’m lucky enough to have. I think of the bonds I’ve deepened in the past month. I now use my smartphone to talk with everyone, and I’m ashamed to confess that it took a global pandemic to make me call my grandparents frequently, although I’m glad I did.  

Easter Lunch with my family

I realized this solitary Easter wasn’t just making me homesick when one of my cousins challenged the rest of us to make grandma’s signature Easter treats and share a photo of our awkward attempts in the family chat. I had managed to avoid compulsive baking until that point, but given that I had recently deep-cleaned the kitchen I figured I should have put that spick-and-span oven to good use.  

Apart from this experiment – and some handmade fettuccine to top Easter lunch off with – I’m not cracking in the kitchen during the quarantine, although I’m obviously eating only homemade meals. I have a feeling that if I took the Compulsive Productivity Road that so many of my fellow content creators are currently riding on, sooner or later I’ll crash into a tree. 

My focus has been so elusive in the past month that I’m constantly stretching it out through the day. Accomplishing the daily word count of the writing I must do for the catalogue of the opening exhibition of Amsterdam’s graffiti and street art museum usually drains half of that focus. Afterwards, I’m left with all the free access courses that were made available in the past month, all the ebooks, the movies, and webinars that have replaced whatever we liked to do before. Most of the time, however, I’m just left with my thoughts. My days are elementary, and they are dotted with elementary amusements like the forgotten feeling of wearing shoes.  

I’m isolating at my boyfriend’s place, with whom I haven’t spent longer than a weekend with before this massive relationship test we are currently undergoing. Somehow, this drastic change of surroundings makes me feel like I’m in yet another place, which is nothing like the Amsterdam where I was living -and working- in before. It was the Amsterdam I was learning to call home, albeit reluctantly.  

However, no matter how different my life looks right now, everything goes on exactly the same; trees are blossoming, birds are singing. And this made me wonder: maybe the point of nature’s beauty isn’t solely for us to take pleasure in it.  

How are you holding up? 

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