back to normal but not really normal

I was in the co-op buying snacks for a blissful afternoon on the beach, when my dearest friend asked me 'what would you think if you saw yourself now, six months ago?'.  I question this a lot. How normal signs of 'keep your distance' or wearing a mask or queuing outside a shop have become. How quickly we've adapted. 

I am in the penultimate hour of a very long coach journey, something that seems to have become a seminal feature of my summers. Unfortunately, this one is not preceding a flight to somewhere hot, but instead to a twenty first, with friends I haven't seen since March. 

I've spent this journey working, napping, reading, and eating a soggy pitta that just did not satisfy my evening hunger. I also got lost in the depths of my blog, circa. March, reading the intricacies of lockdown life. I can't stop thinking about how terrifying and horrible it was, and have had numerous conversations about a quasi-trauma I experience when thinking back to it all. My experience wasn't bad, and of course was not unusual, but the anxiety and the claustrophobia feels almost more intense and almost more unbearable in hindsight. 

It's resulted in a lot of reflection, about life now, life five months ago and life a year ago. And I suppose, in response to Evie's musing, my life feels more similar to how it manifested in 2019 than it did in May. Likely, in the midst of a pandemic, that is not a good thing. But, it also feels somewhat safe and reassuring and relieving to have got lost in this semblance of normal. To have forgotten what it was like to be stuck inside, not able to even see my friends for a walk. 

In so many of my posts I wrote about how I longed for a pub and a walk and to see a face other than my mum's, and now I have all these things and have absorbed them until I am exhausted with over-stimulation, I've almost forgotten we couldn't have them.

It's such a strange and liminal space and world, right now. It's all so normal and also so abnormal. That sitting on this coach with a mask, and relentless hand sanitising is assumed as a rite of travel. That life goes on despite two trillion pounds public debt. That the infection rate rises, and still we eat out to help out and travel further and meet up more. But also that my life is busy, that I go outside, and have plans and that so many of the things I said I missed, I can finally evoke in some form or another. 

I suppose I want to write this to remember, that on a dark day in April, when I thought I had throat cancer but really was just reacting to the stress, I would have never have dreamed I'd be on this coach to see my friends, or that Libby would be coming to stay, or that I'd be able to drink cider on the beach and go out for meals and work in a cafe. 

But also how quickly I slip back into taking these things as a given, and for granted, and not recognising how profoundly blissful it is to have them back.