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I feel like I spent the last two months in an endless cycle of sweeping the floor and washing the dishes.

In quarantine my primary relationship (after the cats) has been with my phone. It kept gloating about our stiflingly close relationship, pointing out my escalating screen time until I turned off that feature. I do not remember my dreams, but I just had a nightmare in which I kissed my phone screen and it cracked.

I know three people whose phones died during lockdown because they got wet. The first was disinfecting everything by washing it, and since the newer phones are supposed to be waterproof, washed the phone, too. The second was exhausted from sanitizing the house constantly, and over-sanitized her phone. The third dropped his phone in the water.

From hereon, and even after the pandemic, everything we do will be through a screen. Before this year, screens had already taken over shopping, dating, and going to the movies. Now we go to work, attend classes, talk to friends on a screen. In the next stage of human evolution the screens will be part of us.

I kept myself together in lockdown by exerting tight controls, and now that they’ve been relaxed I’m a little discombobulated.

A week ago I started reading Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. I had read the rapturous reviews and looked forward to it. The novel follows a family on a road trip from New York to the Mexican border in Arizona, where people fleeing violence and poverty are detained and their children taken away from them. Not long ago the border camps with children in cages were compared to the Nazis’ concentration camps, triggering a debate on whether this was disrespectful to the memory of the Holocaust. Remember when we could talk about other subjects? And then the pandemic began, and everything else has been relegated to the footnotes.

Lost Children Archive is the very definition of relevant. It is relentlessly intelligent and empathetic. But I could not get past 70 pages because good as it is (and good for my conscience), it’s about four people in a car, thinking, with rest stops. Another time. Deepest regrets, but I need something eventful and action-packed. (And yet I devoured Outline and Transit by Rachel Cusk. They are even less eventful, but there is always the feeling that at any moment, something strange and wonderful will happen. Then you realize that it has happened.)

Upon consulting the earlier entries in this journal I am reminded that I was also anxious and out of sorts when lockdown began. Transitions, periods of limbo, cause me to imagine the worst. Having imagined the worst, I know I will now feel better, if not swing to the opposite extreme and become preternaturally cheerful.