16/03/2021
It is the 16th of March 2021: exactly one year after the UK went into lockdown.
I am a disposable mask that shields a person’s face and is designed to protect others from Covid-19.
Spring 2020
It is springtime, the coronavirus is suddenly rampant and I have become a legal requirement in certain spaces. My design is not to protect the wearer of the mask, but those in their proximity.
My relationship with you is in its infancy. We are new sensations in a timid meeting, wary of a new world. I cover your face and feel your skin against my fibres. Your nose is a hillock in constant contact and I feel my boundaries graze your cheeks. I create a small pocket of ‘air’ around your mouth where we part momentarily, birthing a little ecosystem of carbon dioxide; I am the walls of a humid tank and your face, my sweaty resident. We are in this together. The weather is warming up and I can feel little beads of perspiration adhering to me. Your heated air fills me; no matter how diligently you have brushed your teeth, your breath sticks to me on the inside. I am further engrained by the smells of the world on my outer layer; while you are partly shielded from its odours, I am drenched from both fronts. I am trapping your speech, the muffled tones reverberate against my layers, only parts of which filter through to the outside world. It can be lonely. Yet I am penetrable. You and I will get to know each other well.
Summer 2020
The weather is soaring into higher temperatures and our casual acquaintance has transformed into intimacy. I am now ubiquitous and as you wander along I gaze at other faces and see clones of me. There is comradery. We live in a swamp town and the humidity is trapped in between me and your skin; I am now moist with the sweat perpetually pouring out of your pores; I feel guilty. This is not how it was supposed to be. I have encased the heat on your face and your discomfort is apparent as you constantly shift me. I slide around in an emollient layer. Whatever is on your skin, whether plain sweat, makeup or sunscreen, has transferred to this cloth leaving your skin raw. I am now dirty. On my outside I can sense any breeze; you are not so lucky. You feel trapped. The sounds and smells have not changed, I am a vehicle for the scents inside and out, and a stop sign for speech. You abandon me at the earliest opportunity, tearing me off of your face with a deep breath and I am scrunched up in your hand. I feel my layers pressed together in random places by frustration. You will probably dispose of me. It sounds masochistic but I sincerely hope that when you do, you cut my strings, or when I meet my end in the ocean I will strangle a fish and my shame will be complete.
Autumn 2020
The atmosphere is cooling and the rain has reappeared after a dry summer. We are used to each other now. Deaths are down and I feel personally vindicated. You remove me from the box and put me in a pocket of the jacket you are now wearing. Our union is a habit, yet you never forget that I am a symbol of grief. I sit flat in the pocket, warm, waiting to be drawn out. When I finally feel air again you are quick to bend me at the top so I will fit your nose, a familiar sensation. I am flexible. I am back on your face again. I am no longer a greenhouse plastered to your skin, and I don’t feel constantly shifted around due to your transparent discomfort. This is the ‘new normal’ they talked about. You wear me into cafes and shops now; while you hate me I am a passport for rediscovering a sliver of your old life. I smell pancakes and coffee; I feel you smile beneath my three layers. The time has come – you can remove me! I lie, discarded on the table, a sign of rejection that represents a shard of hope. One day this will all be over.
Winter 2020-2021
Temperatures plummet; snow falls; deaths rise again; they say I’m your friend. You are fully locked down once more so I am often neglected and lie crumpled up or thrown away for one of my comrades fresh from the box. When you do wear me you don’t mind the warmth I bring to your face, until your nose runs and you curse my name. Your nose becomes sniffly and itchy; you can’t scratch it as I am an obstructive blanket. I feel you do your best, wiggling your nose around beneath me, to no avail. You cannot blow your nose so once again your face is moist as it has been all year, for different reasons, and you sniff and sniff until you fear others may think you have, you know, it. Like the virus itself, fear is contagious. I see you lift up newspapers to read and feel a sigh come out of your mouth, increasing the humidity. It is discouraging. The weather doesn’t help your melancholy. Wind, rain and snow have battered down and attacked your face but I remain snug, my strings around your ears. I am often caught up in strands of hair; we are tangled, both literally and figuratively, in a discombobulated stress. When we are, on the rare occasion, inside, it is a sea of colours. I am blue like the summer skies in another world, others come in all shades and patterns; we are a rainbow of responsibility together trapping droplets and words and feelings.
16th March 2021: the beginning of Spring
It has been a year and we remain fused together. Yet things have changed. After four dour seasons hope peeks around the corner. A better summer awaits. You and I will say farewell before the heat dissipates. It will not be sorrowful but jubilant; maybe, just maybe, the reappearing light in the flowering spring will sow the seeds of a post-Covid world, freedom for you, and I will be joyful to be no longer needed, but merely a memory.
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