self-imposed isolation

You wanted to get away from it all. Book a cruise. Turns out, it’s a cruise from Hell. Can’t get back inland. Some tourists contracted the virus. Voila. Cambodia, the Killing Field, would take you in. After all, it’s used to genocide, pesticide and any kind of death and dying.

In my time, I experienced similar imposition: in camps, refugee that is. Assortment of them: Subic Bay, Wake Island, Indiantown Gap, Jubilee and adjacent islands, Bataan (you can’t get me back to the Philippines ever, since both times I was there, it’s all about quarantine and isolation) and finally on-campus (three of them, with 2 grad schools) plus a Baton Rouge flood evacuee makeshift camp.

I am used to that visible and invisible barriers (geography and psychology). Ones which separate you from “rest of world”. When I was 4, I watched the adults of my family fight, then a Chinese-fire drill around our dinner table.

Later, I spend a total of 8 years on campus, in the middle of nowhere. Staff would commute from home, but I stayed on, no dinners on Sundays.

So I know a little bit about us vs them. Us = those who are stuck in confined space, them = the ones who are free to go about as they please.

Back to our Killing Field’s hospitality. I am sure people from the cruise-turned-confinement would once again be quarantined ( in land vs at seas), at least for a few more weeks under every kind of scientific scrutiny and supervision. Life of a lab rat.

The globally connected economy is said to suffer greatly as a result of corona-virus. People are dying by the hour. World in crisis. We fright with no place to flight. Our survival instinct kicks in, collectively, we are like a deer facing on-coming headlights. Those with some beliefs pray (please don’t leverage this and say something like the Lord sends virus to “tame” us, as they once did with AIDS & Africa). Those without pray too.

I am ready for the third and final isolation (1st time: first 4 years, all alone, 2nd time, on-campus and in camps, and 3rd time, in crematory oven).

I learn to let go: my own expectations ( over and beyond other’s expectations of me) and am ready for the final “killing field”. But it will not be the cruise ship, much less a cruise from Hell. If isolated, it would be a self-imposed one. That way, I can trick my mind – however self-delusional – as having some control, like Papillon, after his failed escape attempts: born, live and die free.