My COVID-​19 Notebook

Cast of Characters

Laila: Tall, thin, beautiful; born in Cuba to a Black Cuban father and a Jewish mom from Chicago. Trained as a dancer through college, then did a PhD on paintings about poems and poems about paintings. Works in the art world.

Ngofeen: Very tall, long forehead, and eyes that let you know what he’s thinking. Got a law degree, worked in insurance litigation, had enough of his soul sucked, gave it all up to become a podcaster. Parents both from the Congo, born in the Midwest, has lived in New York for four years.

Andrei: Broad chested, big shouldered, close-​cropped hair, a beard of the same length; white and from Europe, born and raised in Poland before leaving for high school and college in England before moving to New York to do his PhD in the genetics of sensory neuroscience. Lived then in San Francisco, Germany, and Los Angeles before moving back to New York. Works helping academics patent outgrowths of their research for use in medicine.

Devon: My bf, bae, partner, person. Short, with a huge smile. Hair cropped close on the sides, but grown out on top. Broad shoulders, skinny waist, skinny legs. He walks fast. Born and raised in Queens, New York; both his parents are Black Americans with family roots in the South. College in Vermont, grad school in California, works in social science research (designing polls and doing data analysis) for a marketing firm.

ME: Not tall, not short, dirty blond and dotted with freckles, especially on the face and shoulders. Raised in rural Washington State but from two Midwestern parents, of Irish and Norwegian descent. College in the Midwest, grad school in NYC, never left. Limp-​wristed scientist; homosexual writer.

Monday, March 2, 2020 (Journal Entry)

At 6:15 p.m., sitting in my office cubicle—​a fluorescently lit corporate-​looking box that blocks off the view from the small room’s large windows overlooking Washington Square Park—​I texted Laila: “Wine o’clock?”

“Wine o’clock was 10 minutes ago.”

“I’ll be there in 15, wine in tow.”

When I rang the bell, Laila’s 9-​pound mutt and my God-​dog, Shiloh, greeted me outside her apartment door. I often stay at Laila’s place—​a tiny but lovely one bedroom in Chelsea—​when she leaves town. From her place, I can walk to work at NYU. Shiloh loves to bury herself under the covers when you sleep, and sometimes, in her dreams, she starts biting your toes.

“So how are you?” Laila asked. I could only laugh.

“Are you going?” she asked. She knew I had a writing conference scheduled next week in Texas, one I go to every year. I’d paid for the plane ticket out of my own pocket, the Airbnb too.

“I don’t know,” I said. Standing just inside her apartment, I opened the wine bottle and she poured two glasses.

“Well?” she asked.

We talked about risk: I’m not the one really at risk, but people will be traveling from Seattle, where this virus is spreading, and from New York, where we think it’s spreading, too. The risk is a conference center with 14,000 people from around the globe. It’s a risk of spreading the virus more than the fear of contracting it myself.

“If it were me, what would you tell me?”

“Not to go,” I said.

“I think you have your answer.”

She talked about how, as a scientist, “a literal virologist,” I have the ability to explain this moment to people. She said that this ability comes with a moral obligation to do the right thing myself, to show people what the right thing is, even when it’s hard, even when there is little or no risk to me, even when I’d rather not. Shiloh was a circle on Laila’s lap, I sat in the corner of her sectional, looking out the window.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll write about it tonight when I get home.”

I don’t know what this journal will become. I don’t know what’s coming our way. I think, but I can’t say for certain that it will be bad, be deadly, change our lives for a time, for a long time, for a year, for more.

When I got home, I texted Laila, “Made it!” and I texted my boyfriend Devon, “Just home crom chez Laila,” and then “*from.”

Here’s what I think. What I know my other virologist friends think. The virus is here, in New York, today. Right now. In our communities. On the train. In offices. We—​all the scientists I know—​know this. And the city’s doing nothing.

Well. Today I decided to do something. I won’t be flying to Texas; online, I’ll explain why. It’s a little something, but I did it, even if that something wasn’t much, wasn’t nearly enough.

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By April we were already tired of quarantine diaries. They were in The New York Times and The Atlantic; they were in The New York Review of Books and Slate and covered in The New Yorker. Speaking of the Gray Lady, the paper published an article titled “Why You Should Start a Coronavirus Diary” (April 13, 2020) followed by a Time essay with a nearly identical title (“Why We Should All Be Keeping Coronavirus Journals,” April 21, 2020).

I started mine March 2.

A journal or diary can help us process these emotionally dense times, to make sense of the senselessness of death, of loss, of isolation, of boredom, even as so much is happening at once. And journals and diaries will be useful documents for archivists and historians to come. It’s plague journals (and fictionalized versions thereof) that give us a day-​to-​day imagining of the bubonic plague years in Europe (Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year) and the Spanish flu (countless historians’ accounts).

But because this was 2020, the world moves at the pace of broadband. These journals became another news cycle. The Internet lets us not just write but publish in real time, no need for the two-​year process of bookmaking, no need for years of archival research making meaning from primary documents. We sat at home anxious with nothing else to do than read about other peoples’ anxiety; we were making (too much) meaning in real time.

Famous writers like Eula Biss and Nick Laird wrote about their lives. Stanley Tucci described his extended family—​his young children and his older children, his wife and a friend of one of his kids, too. Tucci stole away moments to write “from my studio at the back of our garden in London.” I picture him with tired eyes behind moon-​shaped glasses, an early evening cocktail at his hand as he types—​in my mind—​on a burnt orange Olympic electric typewriter, the color matching a pocket square in his tweed jacket.

Healthcare workers—​anonymous and named—​described their horrors, their fears. The ill, including some writers like Leslie Jameson, detailed symptoms arriving, waning, racing back. The fatigues and fevers and shallow breaths, yes. They wrote to us from the vanguard of the virus in our country, and their testimonies were words hidden behind words: stay home, stay distanced, you don’t want to walk this particular path.

Most of us who wrote in our diaries wrote without the urgency of a pressing fever reminding us of a deadly virus replicating in our cells. All of our daily rhythms became potentially deadly or impossible as decreed by law or necessity: get up in the morning, coffee shop on the way to the train on the way to the office, lunch with coworkers, dinner with a friend, a bar because you just find you have too much to talk about and dinner didn’t let it all out. None of this was allowed, not anymore.

And so, to fill the space: the page. A new daily routine to replace the old, writing to replace—​it would seem—​life.

Inevitably, in 2020, writers wrote against this movement. In a book review on the first of the countless COVID-​19 books to come, Lily Meyer wrote in The Atlantic, “No one has had time to truly refine their ideas about personal life in a state of widespread isolation and existential dread, and literature, even when political, is a fundamentally personal realm.” Ummmm, can’t believe I have to say this, but literature is always political and personal both.

It’s impossible, Meyer is trying to say, to write well this close to a crisis; we simply haven’t had the time for the remove that literature requires. Keep a journal. But for God’s sake, keep it to yourself.

A journal, ostensibly, is for the writer alone; it’s for our memory, or to process what we’ve just been through. And yet, journals, notebooks, and diaries—​from famous creatives, yes, but also from regular folks—​have been published as books for as long as books have been published.

Private writing, as I want to define it, moves across genre, from poetry to nonfiction to fictional mimicry. It includes writing that is seemingly for oneself, shared with the world. Journals, diaries, letters, notes from therapy, dream journals, notebooks. So many novels are built of letters or journals, giving a reader the sense of being inside the mind of a narrator, of seeing their thoughts, including the ones they might not ever share in dialogue.

But writing isn’t just thinking on a page; it’s also looking. Journals, letters, diaries, notebooks, these volumes often look at things otherwise considered mundane or unworthy of artistic attention. In an essay/interview on writing, Marguerite Duras describes watching, for minutes on end, the death of a fly on the wall of her home. This act of watching was writing itself: “Around us, everything is writing; that’s what we must finally perceive. Everything is writing. The fly on the wall is writing.” Even now, as I write on a Brooklyn balcony, I’m joined by a horsefly, a foot from my hand. Its eyes burnt red, it licks the table with its proboscis, sensing things I cannot see and therefore cannot describe. There is a tomato plant, now dying as fall marches in, and rosemary still growing strong; there is the sky, high and gray, and even a breeze. There is the fly, not dying, too much alive, but I don’t shoo it away.

In Joan Didion’s short essay “Why I Write,” she says, “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself on people. . . . ​It’s an aggressive, even hostile act.” Who gets to look at the world and write publicly about what they see is not random. It is impacted by educational level, gender, race, class, sexuality, geography, language, everything, all together, always. Many of the writers we read for their first impressions of our shared crisis were in the unique position of being able—​by virtue of their profession and class—​to get away. They wrote to us from country homes, they wrote of boredom, of having to be with their children in a way they typically are not, of having to care for themselves without the help. In The Daily Beast, Erin Zaleski wrote about this famous-​writer COVID-​19 journal backlash in the context of the French literary world: Can someone living in a 300-​square-​foot studio in the 17th arrondissement really care about the existential ennui of a wealthy writer in their six-​bedroom country home?

With my own eyes, I can only see the facts of my own life; through private writing, I can visit the lives of others. Writing, as an art form, is unique in its ability to let us live inside another consciousness for not just the length of a film, but the time it takes to read a long essay or a book. In August, Vanity Fair published a collection of COVID-​19 essays, including a journal by Kiese Laymon and a narrative about the death of her husband by Jesmyn Ward. These essays, exemplifying private writing, enlarged the number and type of COVID-​19 narratives we, as a nation, could read.

Ward wrote, “The absence of my Beloved echoed in every room of our house. Him folding me and the children in his arms on our monstrous fake-​suede sofa. Him shredding chicken for enchiladas in the kitchen. . . . ​During the pandemic, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, terrified I would find myself standing in the doorway of an ICU room, watching the doctors press their whole weight on the chest of my mother, my sisters, my children.”

Laymon wrote, “Day Six: 9,400 Americans are dead from coronavirus, and Donald Trump will not say, ‘I was wrong.’ Mama is scared because the nurse we pay to take care of Grandmama will not wear her mask for fear that it could hurt my Grandmama’s feelings. I am scared because Mama will not stop going to work. She sends me a eulogy she wants me to read if she dies. The eulogy confuses me. There is so much left out.”

I needed to read Laymon and Ward. I needed to see the things Ward and Laymon were seeing.

Didion claims she became a writer because she failed academically: “In short I tried to think. I failed.” For her, writing doesn’t begin with thinking; it begins with looking closely. “In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch.”

“I write,” she continues, “entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

In a crisis, in a pandemic, we all need to decipher what we’re thinking, what we’re looking at, what we see, and—​most difficult to discern perhaps—​what it all means. We all need to write. Writing cements the unbelievable in unbelievable times. Did that really just happen? Did we watch a deadly virus arrive in our country and pretend it would magically go away by April? If I write it down, I convince myself it did happen, even if it seems unbelievable. It was unbelievable. And it did happen. 

Thursday, March 5, 2020 (Journal Entry)

Ngofeen is working from home even though his office is still open. I’ve insisted. He takes Remicade, which weakens his immune system, and so might be at risk for severe COVID-​19 even though he’s young and otherwise healthy. I tell him to tell his work he needs to stay home. The cases are high and still rising in NYC right now. We know they are.

Today we’re working together from home. I live in Chinatown; he’s in Flatbush. We’re both home, together on FaceTime. We always have work dates, just sitting together writing, or me working on PowerPoint lectures while he cuts tape for a podcast. Now I’m at my writing desk in my little, light-​filled bedroom, and he’s at his kitchen table, and I have my writing up and he’s cutting tape, and we both have our headphones in.

I can hear birds chirping outside his window through FaceTime. The birds sound almost like they’re outside my window, but I live on a tree-​free street, no songbirds to be found on my block, just street vendors singing prices and giving free orange slices below. His nature, the birds outside his window, a few miles away, through FaceTime, is mine. I’m anxious every time I go outside. I can’t remember the last time I heard a bird sing. It is such a strange time to try to love and be beautiful toward one another.

Wednesday, March 11 (Journal Entry)

Ngofeen tells me that his office—​where he works on an in-​house podcast—​is just swimming in COVID. Countless cases.

“Shit,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re not going in, that you stopped,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Who knows when I’ll go back,” he said.

And we both said nothing.

Saturday, March 21, 2020 (Journal Entry)

Does it matter that I write the dates in here? I’m writing in Google Docs, as we still have the Internet (for now). I’ll be able to look back, 10 years from now, and see what days I wrote things. And I’m writing them as a journal, in order. What I write follows what I wrote before. This is never how I write essays or books.

My best friend from grad school just moved back to NYC from LA for a job. The city is finally shutting down tomorrow, Andrei got the keys to his new apartment today. For two weeks, he’s been in an Airbnb looking for a permanent place. I biked to Andrei’s Airbnb, to help him pack up. He’d sprained his wrist shopping for his new apartment, carrying bags, and so now he needed me to help with carrying bags. I didn’t want to take the train—​social distancing—​and so I biked.

I decontaminated when I got to the Airbnb. I washed my hands, took off my shoes, redisinfected my fingers with ethanol.

“Can I have a hug?” he asked.

I offered an elbow. I figured he hadn’t touched anyone in a week. Weeks? I knew he needed touch. But I was too scared to touch him.

Andrei today told me, after I helped him move, sitting on the floor in his new apartment, that this pandemic would change him forever.

“How?” I asked.

“Oh I just know it will. In a big way.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Or maybe not,” he added, laughing. “I just feel like the world will be different after, and me too.”

I laughed. Don’t we always feel the world will be different after, and me too. I think this each morning about the day waiting for me.

I sat as he finished unpacking. Our work done, we ate takeout from a Peruvian chicken place a half mile away. I’m happy to have Andrei back. I’m worried about seeing him in person just after he’d flown out here. It’s been two weeks, but we don’t know if that’s enough time yet. But he asked for help, and that risk seems worth taking, to help a friend. Right? Our meal done, I biked back downtown, leaving him with a loving elbow tap. Remember, you can’t touch your elbow to your nose, no matter how hard you try.

Thursday, April 2 (Journal Entry)

My phone rang between noon and 1 p.m. today. After work, I’m supposed to bike up to see Devon and stay for a few days at his place, since his roommate left town.

It was Devon calling me. It’s not unusual to get a call from him in the middle of a day. Maybe he had tennis on and wanted to talk about a point. Maybe he saw a meme that was worth describing, and not just sending on, so he could hear me laugh. He liked talking on the phone, even if just for a couple of minutes, even if I was going to bike to his place in a few hours.

“Well, I’m done for the day,” he said, and then there was silence. It was not even 1 p.m.

I was confused.

“That’s great,” I said. “I can come up now, we can hang a bit before my call!”

Again, silence.

I didn’t know what I was doing, but I accidentally made him say it.

“I just got fired.”

I owned the silence this time.

“Downsized, or whatever. Laid off. Because of COVID.”

Fuck. I felt every inch of my flesh and it all felt bad, infected with an uncertain future, one I couldn’t control.

“Let me pack my bag. I’ll come up right now. Have you eaten?”

Silence, silence.

“Devon, have you eaten?”

“What?”

“Lunch. Have you had lunch?”

Silence, silence.

“Devon . . .”

“No . . . ​no.”

“I’ll bring you leftovers. Sit tight, see you soon.”

It was cloudy and mild, something like spring, as I rode my bike as fast as I could up the Hudson River bike path. He lives some 10 miles from my house. The river looked gray to my left and the city buildings gray to my right and the green grass hadn’t yet come up and so the path and park were muted colors themselves. They might as well have been gray.

Five floors of steps up to Devon’s Harlem apartment carrying my hiking backpack full of food and wine, our needed supplies, and my bike. He opened the door. I was out of breath. He looked empty of himself, he didn’t say anything, just turned around and walked back to the couch and sat down, pulling a blanket up and over himself.

Monday, April 6 (Journal Entry)

The rhythm of my weeks: Bike uptown to see bae Wed or Thurs, back home Saturday around noon to record a Food 4 Thot episode at 4. Saturday and Sunday prepping for the week. Teach Monday, therapy Tuesday, study session Tues night until 8 p.m., my God, teach Wednesday morning at 9:30 my good God, repeat.

The week starts now. I’m not ready. After work, I biked to Trader Joe’s wine shop because lord. Lord lord lord. The line is now outside. We now have to take a cart, mandatory, “even if you’re just getting one bottle.”

On my bike ride home, I realized that it was exactly 7 p.m. when I heard the applause. From my own open window on my own block, I hadn’t heard it yet. I was just a couple of blocks from home, and there it was, hooping and hollering too. Someone was pounding a pot, someone else pounding a smaller pot, higher pitched. It was odd because I couldn’t see anyone. They were inside their apartments, and I didn’t know which apartment the cheering was emanating from as I slowed my bike down the block.

I found myself choking up, and then I found myself wondering why. This gesture felt empty on social media. All the assholes who did brunch two weeks ago are now performing care for healthcare workers, clapping every night at 7 p.m. Honestly, fuck off. Biking down Mott Street, as the sun sets, two blocks from home, appreciative of the absolute absence of traffic, no cars to compete with, hearing clapping rise up suddenly from seemingly empty windows, why am I crying?

Writing now, I know I was crying because I was thinking of my friend Anthony—​one of my oldest NYC friends, I met him my first year here. He’s an ICU nurse. He texted me yesterday that he’s drowning in the ICU.

“I just got through bawling on the metro north with my head down.” He was heading back to the Bronx from NewYork-​Presbyterian Hospital’s overflow COVID-​19 ICU. “This is now definitely one of the worst times in my life.”

After the applause finally quieted, I was biking fast again downhill on Mott Street with a backpack full of wine and I was crying, for the applause, imagining it’s all—​all of it—​for my friend, and I love him, and I don’t want him to get sick.

I climbed the stairs to my apartment and wiped down each wine bottle with ethanol from the lab. I sat down again at my writing desk. My window open, the street is empty again. I can smell someone cooking on a floor below me. I find I am crying again, but now at least I know why.

Excerpted from Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between. Copyright (c) 2022 by Joseph Osmundson. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.