It has been a year without micro-expressions. Those little momentary flickers across someone’s face that tell you everything, absolutely everything. So, mediated by a screen, you blunder on, or you nod heavily, willing your eyebrows and the creases around your eyes to do more work. You stoop to chat through your twelve-inch window like a prisoner, a grid of blank, pixel-smoothed faces unreacting, their forearms Sphynxlike on desks just out of shot.

It is two months into your new job when someone mentions, in passing, that your microphone fails to capture the first few words of every sentence you utter, so no one has heard almost anything you’ve said. Until that moment, you believed that you were uninsightful and off-topic and you actually cried, getting off one call, at the feeling that you were a kind of business ghost, haunting meetings without ever provoking a response. You felt that your disappearance might actually be a relief to your colleagues. And then, when you realised what was happening, you overcompensated, ploughing into conversations like you were trying to rugby tackle the previous speaker, going in head first, hard and loud and fast and fluid.

You have had a lot of conversations, but it has been a year without background noise. No café murmurs or pub chatter, no train announcements: no belongings to keep with you, no buskers, nothing suspicious. No gaps to mind. No shared adverts, only the private, solipsistic ones that follow you from the desk to the sofa to the bed, offering something you don’t need but thought about buying four weeks ago because it reminded you of the vividness of the new. By now, the only square metre of the flat you aren’t sick of is the shower. It has been a year with one sky, hanging over the park you tread for fifteen minutes a day – at 12.30pm when the local Shiba is being walked, and the sausage-cross – in a figure of eight to make the path feel longer.

It’s nice to see the dogs playing, but they are the same dogs every day and you know, by now, that you won’t bump into others. The year has no felicity. No oil in the gears. You push harder to keep it turning, hoping that nothing will snap until the atmosphere returns. But you didn’t realise how much you relied on that felicity, how much you took for granted all those friends of friends. Of course you miss the book and album recommendations – you told your partner that the only album of the year you liked was Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell and she gently reminded you that it came out in 2019. You like hearing what someone else found important, those little tertiary obsessions that offer a little friction to your brain, a reminder that it’s part of a big world. You had never thought of it this way before, but you need people who have never heard your story because they give you a chance to tell it for the first time. It allows you to make tweaks, to try new versions of yourself out for size.

Without this felicity, you are reduced to riffing on the familiar: you want a new jumper like the one you own, but more comfortable. You have finally tried precisely one new recipe from the cookbook you bought two years ago and sometimes leaf through, disconsolately imagining living near a shop that sells asafoetida, and have given up on the idea of giving your money to a real shopkeeper and just ordered the asafoetida from Amazon.  You only then discover asafoetida is also known as hing, so perhaps it was there on the shelves all along. You wince at the weakness of the punchline: it wasn’t asafoetida you were missing, but deggi mirch. And it feels somehow typical that an Amazon order is the most interesting thing that happened that day, a revelation so minor it can barely be massaged into an anecdote. Instead, when you see a handful of friends for a Zoom catch up, you compare notes on which dregs of Netflix contain enough moisture to live off for another 23 minutes.

The summer offered a respite, though it was missing so many of the things that usually make up a summer. You went to a restaurant that had a large aquarium without any fish in it. Summer was like that: blue and still, lacking bodies. You lay in the park on your own, looking up at the sky. For your birthday, you found your carefully numbered friends a beer garden table where you ordered drinks using a shonky proprietary app. When a drunk guy on the next table along told your friend he looked like Jared Leto, and then found out it was your birthday and hugged you, the contact was shocking. You hadn’t hugged your mother in months; you hadn’t held your baby niece yet.

But who do you tell? There’s no one outside this, outside the year, who doesn’t know what it’s like. You and your partner take it in turns to listen to the other’s exasperated outbursts. You just want to go to a house party! You want to be in a club and feel a stranger’s sweat slip against your back, you want to do shots and feel music in your ribcage like your lungs are speakers, and squash onto benches and go to festivals and grab people by the face and kiss their forehead. You drink about the same as you ever did, but no longer in bouts, your intake smeared across the week. You know that by all rights the world’s aircraft should be grounded, but you want to go on holiday anyway and feel a stronger sun, trick your tongue with new flavours, glide through water like a fish in a goddamn aquarium, smell perfume again, because no one wears perfume any more, because no one shares an atmosphere this year; it’s the year without sharing: food and drink, touch, place, space. You are starting to forget what it’s like when a whole cinema laughs together. You forget the swelling roar of a stadium, the harmony of choirs.

Paradoxically, it has been a year without solitude, for you. The two of you are not more than three metres away from each other for more than half an hour a week. There is only the bed, the desk, the sofa. You alternate between them depending on which part of your body is aching, or who has a meeting that requires a neutral background. You put up a menu in the kitchen to remind you of the meals you both like and you alternate between those. You take it in turns to alternate between monologuing at each other about the minor entertainments you have cultivated to keep up the pretence of a distinction between your lives. (She has given up on Animal Crossing and is now devoted to BTS, whereas you have become an Arch-mage in Skyrim.) In the months that you are permitted by law, you go and sit in a café, take your face mask off and just sit, watching the convection on the surface of your coffee as it cools.

Has it been a year? It sometimes feels like it could have been many years, that you are one of a decimated population sitting in one of fifteen empty chairs in Caffè Nero. They don’t quite feel real, those days when you had to queue for ten minutes to buy the coffee, and when you could barely get a seat, let alone one of the coveted armchairs. Now you are splayed out across a sofa; you leave your laptop on the coffee table when you go to the loo because there’s no one there to steal it.

Most of all, you feel ungrateful. This year, there has been a great transfer of wealth from service, retail and entertainment workers to office people like you, who are normally lucky enough to spend half your monthly pay having fun. This is what being lucky looks like: being locked down for a few weeks while it’s raining, browsing for flannel pyjamas on your smartphone. All this yearning for life and yet behind it, you know that many people are not just indoors but gone, really gone. You weren’t thrown to the ground this year. The year didn’t eat your lungs and heart. In news briefings, you are encouraged to think in the fatalistic terms of other seasonal respiratory illnesses, but the comparison only makes the death toll harder to comprehend. You imagine a bomb being dropped on Exeter and survivors in other cities quietly venturing out to Tesco the next day to check if Pizza Express pizzas are on offer this week.

The fact is that, by coincidence, nothing fell on you. You feel acutely that you are reacting sullenly to a life that is perfectly pleasant. You can even see your friends for a winter walk, and do, and it’s nice to catch up. And you sit at a pub bench and have a mushroom risotto because it’s not on your home menu and it feels like an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up. And when, eight days before Christmas, your friend texts you to tell you that they have tested positive, and that they and you will have to isolate for Christmas, you are glad that they aren’t suffering too much. Neither are you. Sitting on your bed, you feel fine. Things could be a lot worse.

The long 2020 ended on 31^st January 2021, a year after the first coronavirus case came to the UK. What do you do at the end of a year that is so hard to celebrate? Perhaps it would be better simply to forget. In Japan, there is a long held celebration called ‘the forgetting of the year’ (bōnenkai). Now, it is mostly for getting drunk, but it originated in sixteenth century feudal Japan as a time for writing, contemplation, and then feasting. As the anniversary of the arrival of the virus approaches, you know without searching that you can forget this year. It has not taught you anything. You know you aren’t perfect and it’s too much to expect that you will become so; you know you have a good life and sometimes take it for granted. Given so much time to decide what you want, you have decided that you want things to go back to normal.

You want to work in an office, go out for dinner, spot something in a shop window, catch up when you get home. You want to have something to catch up about. The tabloids dangle foreign holidays as an emblem of the dream life that awaits us all, but what you actually fantasise about is the symphony of little variations on your old weekly routine. Walking to a desk in the British Library, padding on the thick carpet through the momentous silence of hundreds of people deep in thought. You want to meet your friend outside a café and hug them, and buy them a coffee and bring it to them while they rush for the last available seat. You want to go on the hunt for a nightcap after the pub closes, striding down Old Compton Street and squeezing, elbow first, into a gap at the bar in Café Bohème, passing back drinks to two people you know and one you don’t. You want to take your niece to the park on the weekend, put her on your shoulders and support her little hands in yours. That would be perfect; it will be perfect.

First published by the London Magazine.