Short-Fiction – Alone Together
by DS Coremans
#FoDiByLi
Tuesday 23rd July 2024
Saturday 25 July 2020 – 23:57
It’s been 15 years since I last wrote in this diary. I thought about burning it. It hurts to remember being the child that wrote those things…even worse is knowing that as bad as things were then, it was incomparable with now. I wanted so much to see…
Sunday 26 July 2020 – 01:15
Finally finished. I wasn’t planning on him needing a shower, but he left it too late to ask for help again. I wish he’d just ask rather than waiting till the last minute. It’s been so long since he’s had to rely on anyone other than Dad, who just made the decisions for him. I know he misses him, but he won’t talk about it. He rarely talks about anything, just moans, then says ‘nothing’. I miss Dad too…the house is too quiet without him here. Too empty. Dammit, he’s moaning again.
Sunday 26 July 2020 – 23:21
I wish it were more than just the two of us. I wish I had someone to talk to other than Ian. I remember talking to mum about this, years before she passed away. My life spent caring for them, never any time to meet anyone, let alone having any chance of starting a family of my own. But then the older I got the more care they needed; all of them getting sicker, never better, and now it’s just Ian and me. I should probably count Alister but standing outside for five minutes once a week after he drops off our shopping hardly seems fair. I don’t know what’s worse, that I haven’t seen those wonderful kids of his since we had to shield or the fact that Alister would use them as justification to abandon his brothers. I shouldn’t be so angry with Ali but…dammit
Wednesday 29 July 2020 – 12:05
I said I wouldn’t after the way things went with that last guy, but I found myself back on Grindr last night. I don’t know why I thought three months inside would change anything. The same desperate faces all looking slightly more desperate than normal, and Tinder isn’t any better I’ve swiped right so many times that I’ve already run out of matches. I don’t know why I’m bothering. It’s not like I can go anywhere even if I found someone I liked.
***
*blocked*
***
*blocked*
***
*blocked*
***
Sunday 2 August 2o20 – 15:02
I deleted Grindr. I don’t know why I expected that to be any different. The last 3 months might have been hard for Ian and me, but the way people online are acting you’d think we were living through the actual apocalypse. I don’t get what part of stay inside people aren’t getting. Still haven’t even had as much as a single match on Tinder. I might just have to accept that dying alone is my lot in life and stop trying. It’s even more depressing knowing that no-one wants to talk to me, instead of just having no-one to talk to.
***
*You have a new match. Don’t keep them waiting. Send them a message now*
***
Tuesday 4 August 2020 – 10:44
I’ve met someone…not in person…obviously. I’ve spent the majority of the last two days talking to him. Just a constant barrage of messages back and forth, without any need to try, yet the more I get to know, the more I want to find out about him. I barely know him…but I admit, to myself if no-one else, I’m kind of smitten.
***
***
Thursday 10 September 2021 – 18:10
Alister finally said yes! Calvin and I are all set for Saturday. I promised Alister I would go straight to the flat and not leave. Having Calvin there with me isn’t breaking that promise…not really. I mean Calvin doesn’t even work at the moment, so it’s not like he’s going to be dangerous? Besides, the news seems convinced we’re only a few months away from a vaccine and then everything will be back to normal. Well, as normal as things can be without Dad. I hope the flat is tidy, I honestly can’t remember how I left things after I got the call from the hospital. Where have the last five months gone? Dad’s funeral feels like forever ago already. A whole lifetime passed.
***
***
Sunday 13 September 2021 – 23:34
Alister did well. He even managed to persuade Ian to shower before I got back this afternoon but avoided any other personal care; Ian had saved that particular kindness for me, so I guess there are some things he’s at least loyal to me for. I suppose I should take it as a compliment.
I haven’t heard from Calvin since he left the flat. He looked better in person than his pictures did him credit, that’s I think why I let my guard down so quickly. By the time I stopped kissing him after he arrived, I could see the lust in his eyes from the other side of the room. I tried to keep him at arm’s length for a while, but it was like stopping a wildfire with my hands.
I’d been worried about him not finding me as witty or as interesting as the person he’d been talking to on Tinder. I hadn’t considered that he’d be any less than the person I’ve been fascinated and obsessed with all month. He spent the morning glued to his phone and left while I was in the shower.
***
***
Tuesday 29th September 2020 – 08:53
I had a shower after I got home. I can still smell the hospital on me. I hear the buzzing and beeping ghost of the machine’s noises echo even now that I sit in the silence of my empty home. I had to close the door to Ian’s room, seeing his empty room was unsettling, but the empty wheelchair made me break down completely. I don’t know how long I sobbed. Alister is refusing to talk to me…I can’t say I blame him. I admitted to meeting Calvin after the doctors refused to put Ian on a ventilator and I had to explain why to Alister. He stopped short of calling me a murderer, but I could hear it in his voice.
Now I’m back here. In isolation or is it my own personal purgatory. I feel more alone than ever. At least with Ian here I had a reason to wake up in the morning; a reason to go on, despite his demanding companionship. I might have wanted it, but I don’t think I ever pictured life without him in it… what have I done…what will I do? Oh, Gods forgive me.
Note from the author:
I wrote this story in July 2020. Five months into the global Coronavirus pandemic, and for some the rules and restrictions around isolating were slowly beginning to ease off. For my family and I it would be another two and a half years before we stepped back outside. In July 2020 vaccines were still a distant hope and the numbers of deaths and hospitalisations were still growing exponentially around the globe. The only thing that was certain was uncertainty. Uncertainty which bred an innate sense of fear and loneliness.
‘Alone Together’ was born from those emotions. Unlike the main character in this story I was lucky. I had my entire family around me at this time, and though scared at times in trying to keep us all together. We never strayed far from the path. Knowing that our perseverance in our isolation, though difficult to endure, was the right thing to do to keep us all as well as we could be. Within the first few weeks of lockdown, my father faced surgery and treatment for cancer for the second time. In the story the main character was not as lucky as I was, my father recovered and was soon at home with us again where the rest of his recovery took place.
I was also lucky to have the support of an older brother who was very much more involved than the older sibling in this story. Indeed, in order to survive the pandemic, though we may at times have felt alone, we were ‘Alone Together’.
Stylistically this was my first attempt at an epistolary story, something I had only just been introduced to as a writer during my second year of University. An entire year of online learning meant that most of my conversations and communications took place on or via screens and this style resonated with me at the time. I liked the mix of traditional epistolary form in that of diary entries, but I enjoyed bringing a more contemporary style to the story in the way that these diary entries were intersected with excerpts from text based communication. Colour coding the ‘texts’ to simulate the platforms as well was a fun way of bringing some of the background to the story into play visually without having to formally explain it.
Overall I loved writing this story, and as bleak as it was, I felt strongly that it captured the very real sense of horror which the Coronavirus pandemic represented. The fear of loss, the fear of missing out, and the fear of the unknown all of which many of us knew too well during this time.
DSC
23/07/2024
‘Alone Together’ was written for and published in the Lockdown 2020 Writing Initiative anthology collection published and edited by the talented writer and editor Sam McGurran of the Gorbals Writing Group (GWG). It is still available for purchase on Amazon.
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