Topics of Conversation

Wilfred blazer (c/o) (similar)
Uniqlo blouse
H&M trousers
Zara sandals (similar)
Looks Like Summer clutch (similar)
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Daisy London earrings (c/o)
Location: Saint-Boniface Cathedral – Winnipeg, Manitoba

This last week of May marks eleven weeks since quarantine began. Although we are lucky here in Manitoba to be allowed to go out more now, which means the grey  roots that felt so visible when we took these photos are now coloured and I’ve visited my parents, most of us know it likely still isn’t advisable. Life goes on, largely indoors. I find that easier to accept some days than others, but overall, I can live with it. What I can’t live with is one unintended result – how limited our available topics of conversation have become.

The wonderful, and sometimes awful, thing about life is its incredible capacity to surprise us. A year ago, I would never have imagined that a time would come when leaving home would require me to give careful consideration whether any trip I took out of my apartment was truly necessary. I could not have fathomed any phenomonenon that could reduce all of my friendships  to lengthy video chats and text messages. There is no way I could have conceived of what it would be likely to simply have so much time.

That time is a gift, I try to remind myself. It’s allowed me the space and given me the impetus to reconnect with myself and rekindle relationships that I’ve allowed myself to neglect. (We were all so busy, pre-pandemic. It was easy to neglect a lot of things.) But the only way to rekindle relationships right now is through conversation. And the more I talk to people, the more I realise just how little any of us have to say for ourselves right now.

The world is closed. If we can, we continue to work from home. We read the news and follow the development of the pandemic close to home and far away. There is little else to do, really. Every time I talk to a friend, I find myself lamenting the lack of new topics to discuss. “I wish I had something to say for myself that wasn’t about work or COVID-19.”

…but I don’t.

There are some pandemic-adjacent topics that we can chat about, like politics. But even politics is all about COVID-19 now; which governments are handling it well and which aren’t, why certain approaches work in one country or city but not in another… It all comes back to the same thing. And it’s unbearably boring.

It spills over into every aspect of life, too. When I write, all that I can write about are past experiences, because I haven’t experienced anything in the present for approaching three months. When I pause to ponder what I will share in this space in a given week, I question if there is anything at all I could discuss that isn’t related to life, or the lack thereof, in this moment. There must be some topics you haven’t yet broached, I tell myself. But I never come up with any. (If I did, I wonder if they would even feel relevant right now?) So I come back, week after week, to chronicle this seemingly endless but realistically still very brief phase of life and my current thoughts about it. It’s the same thing I’d do if we were video chatting.

I still believe there is more to life – that there must be, and will be again. And that when that day comes, we will remember what it is like to have so many topics to touch on in a conversation that we’re excited and don’t know where to begin. But for now, all that is happening to me is work and quarantine. So that’s what I’m going to be talking about for the foreseeable future…

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