Time Travel, Teleportation, and Telepsychiatry

I hate the virus. I'm pacing through the sepulcher, otherwise known as my apartment, wondering how my social distancing sacrifices will be monumentalized within these walls. I'll surely die here confined by these 600 square feet. I am deeply alone, and yet I am bombarded by notifications of “connection.” This living space has also become my workspace and my place of leisure. Days become nights and, in the absence of routine, time collapses.

I stare at myself in the mirror and begin to laugh at the absurdity of my wardrobe: a shirt, tie, and a new pair of sweatpants: my patient will never know. I am tying my tie and I am flooded by memories of my father walking me through the motions, hundreds of times, until I learned to master it on my own. I'm finding it particularly difficult to tie a knot today. “Stop thinking about it and do it,” I tell myself, echoing my father. I miss my father's voice.

Time and space have lost their coherence before. I remember first coming to terms with the idea of a “time zone” when my family, excluding my father, immigrated to the United States when I was six years old. For various reasons, Baba was forced to stay in Saudi Arabia for one year after the rest of us departed. I recall both the pain and the wonder of speaking to my father on the phone: he under the night sky and I under the sun. Our voices were the bridge between day and night. At times, I thought our voices alone would shatter the distance. I pictured the sound waves that connected us traveling through the telephone wires I had seen earlier that day. I imagined what it would be like to join those waves on that journey through the wires to once again reconnect with my father. Despite my inability to metamorphosize into a sound wave, I found myself, nightly, in Virginia, in Riyadh, under the sun, under the moon, so near to my father, and yet so far, all at the same time.

I write this now, envying my previous ability to exist outside of time and space. For now, however, I have finally tied my tie and can't be late for my patient: He has been struggling with the isolation brought about by the virus.