I have been waking up for the last few weeks with time dripping from my fingertips. I spend my days with its translucent substance grabbing me by my throat every time I attempt to mask it with earthly activities. It is a silent substance with ten times the power of words, but is it not the duty of the writer to turn substance and sense into words? Well, in times like this, it depends.

Before the pandemic came into being, I would only come face to face with that substance on Sundays, or between work hours, or when I had made my coffee a tad too strong and it had me gushing with inspiration. 

However, when I felt an absence of ideas to pour into a plot, I had learnt to avoid the ferocity of productivity in writing. I would come up with something to do and shoo the heavy substance of time away. “I can’t deal with you now,” I would tell it. “I have so many other things to do.” 

The substance would understand. It would gently dissipate into my hectic hours. I would exploit its absence to justify my inability to write. 

But now, the substance will not leave my sight. It is my lockdown companion, following me everywhere, everywhere, reminding me of its overflowing presence. The substance is inarticulate, but boy do I know what it means to tell me.

I sit at my writing desk and suffocate from its potency. Deep down, I know what the trick is. I need to transform it into words. I need to pluck out its roots and plant them in my sentences. But somehow, for many reasons, I cannot. 

I am even frightened by social networking. The substance has even found a way to reach me there. “With Self-Isolation, Writers Finally Find the Time to Write,” the headlines read. “10 Tips for Writers Under Quara-” I have already scrolled down and away. “Did You Know Shakespeare Wrote King Lear During the Bubonic Plague?” Please stop reminding me.

I slip away into music. Perhaps the substance won’t find me there. But there, too, I find words. At this stage I want to avoid anything that has to do with the art of combining words to not be reminded of my failure in sprouting them. 

I turn to instruments. The world of Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Erik Satie. I place their fruits within my ears and close my eyes. For a few moments I meditate on their movements, their ups and downs, they move in my mind like waves. It begins to work. Something stirs within me. I begin to write a sentence behind my closed eyes. “I don’t know what day it is,” I write under the influence of Gnossienne 1, “but I am walking in a sunflower field. The air is greasy and the wind smells of rotten grass.” 

I stop writing. I open my eyes, fiercely. “But what does that have to do with the pandemic?” I ask myself. “How can I relate the smell of rotten grass to the pandemic?” I spend hours attempting to make a connection that is bound to fail. The substance dances around me demonically. “Use me,” it screams into my flesh. “Use me while I am here.”

Writing is a solitary pursuit, they always say. Writers need isolation, is that not right? Well, I have been isolated in my room for weeks now. I think about Henry David Thoreau and his cabin in the woods. I think about Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, these brilliant writers who voluntarily separated themselves into their rooms and sheds for days, weeks, months, to be able to birth words. I begin to imagine myself in their shoes as an active observer of a massive pandemic that has pegged “touch” and “bodily contact” appalling. 

This virus has affected over a million, and taken the life of over 70,000 humans. Empty roads, closed shops everywhere. Leaving one’s house is crime. Airports are shut down. The three most lusted after products are alcohol, face mask, and gloves. How can I, a writer in self-isolation, turn these extraordinary elements into literary impetus? 

Do these feelings of ineptitude and unwillingness to write about the coronavirus peg me an incapable writer?

I rack my brain attempting to find the adequate response. My ineptness at unearthing a solution deprives me of appetite, of sleep, of sanity. 

It is afternoon in Beirut and I have only now awakened. I hear my mother speaking on the phone with our relatives abroad. They must have asked about me. “Oh, her laptop is taped to her lap!” she tells them. “Yes, you’re right! She must be working on a book.”

“Yes, mother, I think I am working on a book, or maybe it’s a poem,” I tell her when she hangs up. “Well, what is it about?” She asks from the other side of the wall. “A sunflower field,” I tell her. She is silent. “A sunflower field where the air is greasy and the wind smells of rotten grass,” I continue. I can feel her smiling from behind the concrete. The grip of time on my neck gradually loosens.

I come to terms with the pressure of forced productivity that has been making me question my artistic versatility.  I come to terms with the fact that I need not come out of this heavy, compulsory self-isolation having produced the greatest work of literature.