Sex, Travel and The Pandemic

Skylights, Living Alone, And The Secret Weapon

I laid in the bathtub, my eyes fixated on the shower head above. I remained there for hours until my hands and feet turned pruned.

The water was cold now.

The heat of the water relaxed me and slowed my racing thoughts to a manageable level. Going for long walks or runs also helped, but the rainy and grey English skies made the prospect of going outside seem gloomy. So, there I sat, in the bathtub, awaiting my fate.

What was my fate? Was I supposed to wait till I get sick of COVID-19 and die, or till I go stir crazy and jump out a window? I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what to do, where to go, or who to talk to. So, I remained in the bathtub.

The future was now more of an enigma than ever, and what made it even worse was that I was alone. For the first time during my time in the pandemic, I was alone. Like actually alone. I had gotten my own apartment in downtown Sheffield. It was a spacey and beautiful two-bedroom skylight apartment. I moved in on April 30th after about a month of staying in the private room in the house with the two nurses.

While In the private room, I opened Airbnb frequently to search for cheap “Entire Units.” One day, the skylight apartment showed up, as though by magic, with a very tempting price tag of US$382 for two weeks.

The Skylight Apartment is a premium and usually expensive place to stay in Sheffield. However, due to the pandemic, the demand was next to nothing, so the owner dropped the price considerably. I booked the apartment as soon as I could.

It felt great being in such a beautiful apartment, but it was there that the loneliness of the pandemic really began to creep in. I had this big, well-designed skylit apartment all to myself, but every inch seemed hollow and void, like the inside of a bubble. When I was in the private room, Simba was always there to keep me company whenever I needed. The cute four-legged companion had become my best friend.

Now, he was miles away on the other side of the city, hopefully missing me too.

There were people that I could call. My ex-girlfriend was out of the question. I hadn’t spoken to her for months. I could have called Anna, but she was a bit angry at me now. I could have called my parents, but they worried too much, so they were out of the question. Any conversations with my parents were mostly surface-level. “Yeah, mommy, I’m doing fine.”

I wasn’t actually lying. I was doing fine on the surface. I had a place to stay, food in my belly, and just enough money in my pocket to survive in expensive England. But my insides were in turmoil, knotted with hopelessness and anxiety. I just wanted things to go back to normal, but now, a little less than two months into the pandemic, there was no sign of it coming to an end. The vaccines, though a glimmer of hope, were still possibly months or even years away from being available.

There were times I would sit on the massive living room couch and stare at the corner of the room. I had no inspiration whatsoever to get up or walk around or play video games or even work. And that proved to be a problem.

My blog was still generating enough revenue to supply all of my needs. My job as an Entertainment Blogger remained relevant even amidst the pandemic. People still watched movies and TV shows and still read articles about it. My job seemed safe, especially after the release of the steamy Netflix film “365 Dni”. Every single article I wrote about the show went viral.

Were The Sex Scenes in 365 Dni real? – Viral

10 Things you didn’t know about Michele Morrone – Viral

365 Dni 2: Everything We Know So Far – Viral

It went on like that, and with the virality came the money.

But to keep my blog making money, I had to work, and as the days passed by, I became more and more uninspired. Writing an article became as difficult as cutting down a tree with a toothpick. I wrote less and less, and my blog suffered because of it. I’ve never been so down in my life that I forewent all activities. Usually, whether I’m happy or sad, I would always find the inspiration to do stuff. I would exercise, work, go out, and hang with friends. When I had lost my job at the political blog, it didn’t stop me from working. Yeah, I had anxiety and stress but not enough to completely floor me and keep me in bed. The same thing happened when I broke up with my girlfriend. I was sad but was still active. This was a different kind of sadness. A kind of sadness that I had never experienced before.

Thoughts of my blog dying again the way it had died before invaded my mind. The thought of becoming a failure again, like I was in 2018, followed after. These thoughts did not do well for my mental health.

My blog was my only source of income, and if it died right now, I would be totally screwed. I was no longer able to return home, nor was I able to leave England. If I lost my only source of income, I’d end up homeless and starving and probably die. This may sound like an exaggerated thought, but it wasn’t. This scenario was playing off for hundreds and thousands of people around Europe.

Despite these harrowing thoughts, my inspiration and zeal to do anything about it remained null. It’s like my body was saying, “If you go broke and die, then so be it. Stop being a little sissy! People die all the time.”

My family would tell me to turn to the divine, but God was rather quiet, and the devil was busy destroying lives. I looked up through the window in the ceiling to see if I could spot the turtle in the sky.

My middle man was nowhere to be found.

I didn’t fight the feeling; I didn’t have the strength to. I thought I had gotten rid of the zombies back in London when I torched them but apparently, I hadn’t. They were slowly, but surely making their way back into my life. The anxiety, the stress, and, dare I say, they brought a friend this time… depression.

I couldn’t just sit and do nothing and let my life fall into ruin. I couldn’t do it myself. I needed help. My blog needed help. Anna from Germany was initially supposed to be the help I needed to run my blog, but as you already know, that plan had fallen through the cracks.

I needed to regain control of my life, body, and mental health, or else I would have died both figuratively and literally. I felt as though I was rotting away in that beautiful skylight apartment. It was a well-designed tomb, housing a dried-up and beaten-up corpse. I was a mummy, shuffling around, wrapped in hoarded toilet paper rolls. I had this big goal of traveling the world alone, with no one to hold me back. That dream came true and became more real than ever because I was out in the world, and I was truly and deeply alone. The universe has a funny and diabolical way of giving you exactly what you ask for.

I needed to act.

With the little energy I had, I flicked open my laptop and posted a job on Upwork for an entertainment writer. I got a lot of requests, but I ended up picking a girl from the Philippines named Janet. I was a bit skeptical at first, given that English wasn’t her first language. But she was the cheapest and all that I could have afforded at the time.

I tested her out for a few days, and she exceeded my expectations of someone who spoke English as a second language. She was hardworking, got the articles done timely, and she was very competent. Because of her, I was able to get my blog back on track. She was what I needed. She was my secret weapon. She was like my own personal Janet from the Good Place.

She was a band-aid on a gunshot wound. A temporary solution to a bigger and more dire problem.