My wife walked in here last night to tell me something, and she asked me if I’d been talking to someone.

“Probably,” I said.

And then this morning I read a headline about people talking to themselves during the pandemic isolation, so. Nothing to see here.

I think I was whispering to myself, actually. I was either imagining a conversation and creating my end of it, or I was just running words over my tongue. I like the way words sound, the way various accents change the melody, the found poetry nature of snippets of spoken language. Hey, I’ll talk to myself when I feel like it.

Even though there hasn’t been a radical change in my lifestyle over the past 10 months, just more of one part and less of another, I guess I should make a list one day. The changes, the adjustments, the side effects of loneliness and boredom.

Not today, though. Except apparently I talk to myself from time to time. Not really news.

Julie sort of nodded at my acknowledgment. The truth is, our lives have changed dramatically, if not theatrically, and it’s mostly about staying home. She hasn’t been in a classroom since March 6, and it’s not likely that she’ll return. In the past, she’s enjoyed a balance, some music classes, some core, mostly religion (it’s a Methodist private university), but now it’s just the music. And the music world is broken, and probably will stay that while for a long time.

Yesterday I got a notification that my Fitbit’s battery was very low, a very pandemic thing. I developed a habit long ago of charging that battery when I take a shower – 20 minutes or so a day seemed to be enough. And I probably don’t have to explain why showers are less frequent these days.

This reminded me that I haven’t been receiving those Fitbit weekly summaries lately, and when I opened the app on my phone it was blank, with none of the fields populated. I literally hadn’t looked at it in weeks and weeks, and there were apparently some digital cobwebs.

I force-closed it and tried again, same thing, but with logging out and back in and some other stuff, everything synced and right on time, the weekly email showed up. This all made a weird sort of sense.

“I have a feeling my Fitbit thought I was dead,” I told Julie.

So. No movement. Weird eating habits. Unstructured time on top of being very busy, an odd combination, the result of working from home, something I should understand after 30 years of this but it’s different, somehow. It’s all different.

And it’s because we don’t see other people. That’s the ballgame, right there, the question and the answer. I spend 15-20 hours a week on Zoom calls, which makes the situation murky, but I’ve only seen a handful of people I know over the past 10 months, and then most of them for only a minute or so, usually folks who stop by to drop something off. We wave and chat from many feet away, muffled behind our masks, but again – this has been a tiny fragment of time. I’ve definitely been around more strangers, in the grocery store or the pharmacy, but even that’s been limited and now practically zero, for weeks and weeks.

That’s everything. I wouldn’t have grasped it a year ago, couldn’t have understood, but more than creaking joints and binge watching, much more, it’s been about the isolation. That’s the change.

…

I tried to write something yesterday, in a column, although I never quite got there. It was about the phenomenon of our different pandemics, or what we can see from here. Which means social media, mostly.

I told Julie that I thought there should be a name for us, the way we have others. There are the long haulers, the ones who got Covid and continue to suffer from longterm effects, many of them disturbing. There are the antimaskers, of course. Essential workers is another. You get it.

So we should have a name. Those of us who have done what we’re supposed to, shut up and sealed up. We worried about friends who couldn’t, some teachers and some healthcare workers. We fretted about the kids, and what to do. We learned strategies and techniques, and we settled down to wait.

And then we saw them. It took some months, as we all had our own timelines, but eventually the message got through: some people are special, or, rather, are convinced, somehow, that the rules don’t apply. You see them, too.

I got irritated and then angry, then depressed, and now I’m just sort of numb, but curious. I don’t know how, when this is over, I will socialize or interact at all with these people. I’m sure I will; I just can’t imagine how that will play out.

I also think that they wouldn’t get it. There’s obviously not only a regional disconnect, but a personal one. I don’t know if it’s the bane of our current existence, the lack of sophistication in news consumption, or just selfishness. Honestly. I don’t know, or understand.

But while some of us, and probably most of us, are following the rules, we see the ones who aren’t. I just think we need a way to identify each other. The Behavers, maybe.

If you’re confused, then here’s a cheat sheet – If you’ve had people inside your home, or have been inside another person’s home, or eaten a meal inside with people who don’t live in your home, or stood next to someone, even outside, or touched someone else, or hugged someone, you’re not a Behaver. You’re the problem.

And while I guarantee that my fellow Behavers understand this, I can imagine that you don’t. If your mind goes to contingencies, to rationalization, to defiance or to justification for whatever reason, you’re definitely the problem.

I can just see people being mystified, despite virtually every virologist and epidemiologist and physician on the planet saying that we all need to be Behavers.

Even if you consider yourself immune, even if you suffered with Covid-19 and are now recovered, and you assume you can’t get it again (this is a dumb assumption, and you really should research this), and you feel comfortable bopping around the neighborhood, stopping in stores to mingle with the others – why would you tell the rest of us? Why would you post pictures? What kind of person would gloat over their fancy meal to people who are starving?

That’s what I’m talking about. I have no idea how this works out. Probably some major forgiveness needs to come into play here, but I really have no idea. I just know that one day, I’m going to see some of these people in the flesh, and they’re gonna want to hug me, and I’m not gonna.