Sex, Travel and The Pandemic

The Mustache

*ding* *dong*

Someone was at the door.

At 7 in the morning?! Come on!

I crawled up from my bed, my brows heavy and muscles stiff. My body was in no position to be moving at this time of day.

I rubbed the sand out of my eyes, cleared my clogged throat then trudged to the door.

A nurse in a big yellow hazmat suit stood in front of the door, accompanied by a burly Turkish police officer with a mustache that seemed way too big for his face. The officer was more of a mustache than he was a man, and I feared for my life that it would come alive and attack me in some sort of twisted and maniacal plot of Mustache brutality.

“Ancil Gonzales?” asked The Mustache.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m sorry to inform you that you have tested positive for COVID-19.” The Mustache continued.

My mind was too cloudy to compute the situation. It was fricking 7 am. In my mind, this could all be a dream or nightmare, and it was only a matter of time before I woke up. My mind and my body were numb to the news, as though they hadn’t quite yet realized that it was, in fact, real. It wasn’t a dream. There was indeed a Turkish police officer and a nurse in a hazmat suit relaying to me the very real truth of what was going on inside of my body. I was harboring the equivalent of microscopic contagious spawns of Satan with the ability to possess anyone who came into close contact. They were relaying to me my final sentence before subjecting me to two weeks of exorcism.

The Turkish government had only just implemented lockdown and curfew rules to curb a new wave of a deadly and contagious coronavirus plaguing its citizens. They were becoming stricter by the day, and my situation was about to face the brunt of it.

The Hazmat then chimed in and began to explain all the rules to me, which somberly included that by no means was I allowed to leave the apartment. If I needed anything, I could order it online or message my handling officer, who was, as you could guess, The Mustache. If I disobeyed these rules, I would be branded as a criminal, and The Mustache would be given all legal rights to find me and arrest me. The Hazmat had said a few more things, but it all became muffled over the sound of my brain finally waking up to this news. This wasn’t a drill. This wasn’t a dream. This was real life. I was stuck, broke, and alone in Turkey, 6000 miles away from my home country of Trinidad and Tobago, which, for all intents and purposes, barred me from reentering due to this new virus. This wasn’t just a normal kind of stuck. I was stuck in the sort of way gum gets stuck under your shoe. All I could think now was, “how the hell did I get here?”

Scratch that! On second thought. I knew exactly how I got here.