What struck me first coming from Singapore was the openness of things. Faces open, refusing my mind’s attempts to mask them, skies open, arms open like the bays of the harbour and the yawning mouths of the music hall shells. I am returned to my Ithaca from ten years away and nothing outside is closed.

Safely roomed, I remove my mask and squint at the tinsel-lit balconies atop the green-blue water lapping against the quay. Incongruous now seems the rebuke of closing doors behind. I am returned and almost nothing is closed, nothing but this 4-star Quarantine Station. Open and closed, Sydney in the time of contagion.

Only the window pane creaking to big reminds me the winter sun is awake; I rip back the curtains to catch its light and envy the construction workmen on the Gateway starting their descent over scaffold steps to smoko, imagine their convivial blue banter punctuated by puffing consonants, as though forged in a furnace of foul language. I envy them their nexus.

Like the Greek form of torture in which the victims could not experience that which they adored most, I am staring at the baths of my boyhood, not able to swim, the parks whose paths will not wear my tread and whose pointy pilferers will deprive me not of my lunch.

And yet, 7 miles and hundreds of years East are the screams of forebears fallen foul of one flu or another and innocent ancestors of first people, stricken from the contamination of new arrivals; lucky am I to live in a time no civilisation could ever have imagined to be so opulent in a country so generous. Lucky am I, grateful indeed; my temporary deprivation hardly even a strand of hair on the animal of human suffering. Grateful am I. Lucky indeed.

Header photo by Free Nature Stock from StockSnap.