As I write this, we have entered the fourth phase of lockdown. In 2007, if someone had told us that we'd be nabbed at home at a gunpoint of a virus scare, I'd have told them to get off the internet chain mail spam.

But, here we are.

A friend and I both agree on the instance that there are multiple hot takes on the lockdown. There's a whole Anne Frank vibe with people in art, outside of art practicing hobbies and art forms and marking a day each. There are business entrepreneurs using infantile art to raise money. Confession: I placed a bid on a few and won myself a whole piece (it's not bad looking, thank you).

My point being, just as much as there is this entire sitch, there are those many hot takes, a sort of background noise to it.

Terms being added to our conversations including apps and software that help us perform better remotely. I don't mean food or grocery delivery but things like being recited bedtime stories in the absence of inspiration as you otherwise had for your child among others.

There is the personal end of things. Dealing with the lockdown. Reeling under the lockdown. I'm yet to meet one person who's not personally burnt atleast half a dozen bridges during this time.

If Dolphins returned to Italy then closer home, fuckbois are trying to score brownie points with women they'd never hoped to talk to.

There is an acute sense of disenchantment with existing relationships, inability to form new relationships, and then the audacity to curate new situations and budding relationships to walk into this lockdown with. I've been guilty of all. I've forged seemingly surreal new connections, been called out one too many times on being negligent and hurtful with people in my life and then seemingly been told to shut my face by people close to me, not one, many.

In a way, it brought up a huge void here, on this page.

What do I write about when people close to me tell me I'm effectively a ball of a make-believe world, with a little sense of understanding, and I have a problem understanding communication, authority, and boundary.

With the number of allegations I've come to live with, I've had to effectively take time off from taking my time off. I've been asked to be empathic and give people leeway when I haven't been on the receiving end of it, from those who I expected to love and kindness from.

The real pandemic has been on communication and our ability to express with gestures, actions, and words. Somehow, with the absence of our ability to do the former, the latter can't withstand the burden of carrying our lives with other people. I've found myself getting short with people I adore to bits knowingly and otherwise. I've also felt a total lockdown in people expressing their true emotions in this.

Effectively, I've found myself locked in a room of sarcasm, pity, unsolicited advice, and then reality checks all at once. There have been days when these revelations happened all at once and then on the other where they took time to simmer and come as backhanded insults.

Effectively, I've learned what a terrible excuse of a human being I am. I've also in turn given it to people. Neither of the situations has been helpful, to say the least. I'm also not proud of not having taken the higher road of silence, taking it in.

I'm after all a fucking human. I am prone to mistakes. I do things. I am responsible for the faltering. I do them again. Falter again. There are times I walk into a puddle of quicksand unknowingly and then on other occasions, I feel I'm pushed into it.

It's not a conducive or healthy environment to be in. What's more worrying is the aftermath of if and when this is over.

In the last week, my biggest learning is not about relationships but friendships. Apparently, you can read into years of knowing someone incorrectly, as something which is only seemingly in your head. God save us from daydreaming anything then.

Maybe this is a conspiracy theorists' job on how we should imagine our lives to be. There's a fine line between living and dreaming. If I have imagined a whole friendship, who is to say if I'm being gaslight or should I be allowed the privilege of free-thinking ever again?

If the last time, I wrote about my father and our complexities, this time it's my closest friends calling me out on my crap.

Admittedly, there's a lot. This is why friendships exist (among other things). We live through each other's idiosyncracies and we lighten those up and we hold them tight when they need us.

I feel I have overburdened people and they have underwhelmed me. It's a two way street of non-consensual activity. If they found my actions abhorring, I found their reactions appalling.

No one is to say that I'm not at fault. Perhaps, the whole fault is mine that I have constructed these notions of friendships in my head. Maybe, it's all me, as I'm being gaslight.

But god forbid, it's not me, the irreversible damage of second-guessing the one thing I know well, has been done.

In between questioning what's sacred and the bonds we all believed are unbreakable, the virus has questioned not only the world but also the way we think. It's accelerated and amplified our thoughts and reactions into effective results.

I could live with a bad friendship for years without making a fuss. Today, I find myself incapable of doing that. If I do as much as a point in the direction of a problem, I get a sharply worded response, which is, to be fair, an activity of equal action and reaction. Empathy is a construct of the world we inhabited in pre-COVID times.

I've been a strong believer in friends being support systems and especially true for me. I value my friendships close to my heart, I go all out for it. Until well, now, that the virus has left me questioning my own set of beliefs and principles.

Between media capital restructuring, changing world and societal interactions, layoffs, deaths, disasters, and the inability to cope up with our solitary self, our friendships are at stake.

I fucking hate COVID, motherfucking reality checker.