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The first lockdown breakdown Dan had resulted in a lot of angsty, metaphor-laden songs and a head full of bleached blonde hair. It was horrific for a day or two and then he decided to simply roll with it. So he was now a bottle blonde in his thirties. And what? It wasn’t like anyone was going to be seeing him for a while.
It made him start when he saw himself in the mirror, when he caught himself in the window after dark he didn’t recognise himself but after a few days he was used to it, even if his friends still thought it was hilarious.
Dan had so many ideas and so many thoughts and being trapped in a house with all of them was slowly driving him to distraction. He simply wasn’t used to being stationary for so long. He wasn’t used to waking up every morning in the same place, have his entire wardrobe at his disposal rather than just whatever he had packed for the weeks on the road. He wasn’t used to having long days of nothingness stretching out before him like an eternity and nothing on the horizon to fill them. He stopped checking his calendar and stopped keeping track of what day of the week it was.
After a few weeks he ripped his books from the shelves and re-arranged them, first by colour, then by alphabet, then by genre. Bleached his hair again. Considered also doing his eyebrows but decided it would look strange at the last minute. Contemplated doing an online degree for the hell of it. Watched all the films that had been sitting on his Watch Later for far too long.
He paced and paced and sleep became more elusive than ever. Dan had been an insomniac for as long as he could recall but the pandemic had made the lines between day and night, reality and dreams blur horrendously. In a moment of three am insomnia inspiration he whisper sung some lyrics for the new album into his phone. When he listened back to them the next morning he realised they were shit and deleted them out of shame. He read War and Peace by Tolstoy. Watched Twin Peaks the whole way through in two days. Learned some random theatre songs on his keyboard. He collected an embarrassing amount of plants until the house resembled a botanical garden.
His housemates worked from home and Dan spent his days trying not to accidently wander into anyone else’s zoom calls and conferences. The stack of mugs in his room seemed to grow by the hour. He stopped eating meals at regular times and just ate whenever he remembered to or when he happened to be in the kitchen.
Dan’s skin felt like it was crawling and crawling and nothing felt like it was enough. He had a panic attack that made him feel like he was dying over not being able to finish a song. Anxiety made him feel shaky and sketchy. He lay on his floor in the dark for hours at a time and tried to breathe. The walls felt like they were inching closer every day.
It was his housemate Sophie who took pity on him and suggested he take over the spare room as a sort of home studio, mainly to prevent him having to do interviews with national radio stations while sitting in his bedroom at his tiny desk. And it was Sophie who suggested they paint it, because it was currently a boring cream and it made Dan feel depressed just looking at it.
So Dan took on a spare room renovation as a little lockdown project.
The first thing he did was order some bright green paint after spending an embarrassingly long time comparing shades across websites and online stores. The colour was called Frog Prince and it made him smile. Dan painted it over the course of two days, high as a kite from the paint fumes because he forgot to open the windows. He blasted a bunch of old favourite albums, got himself covered in paint and grinned at his green streaked face in the bathroom mirror in the evening. His house mates called him Shrek and his skin was crawling a little less.
Round two of project renovation was moving the small jungle of plants he had accumulated over lockdown to the room and suddenly the whole space smelled clean and earthy. Every spare surface and inch of floor had some sort of plant on it and he kicked over a fair few by accident because Dan had never claimed to be particularly coordinated or spatially aware. As it turned out, getting soil out from between the cracks in floorboards was an absolute nightmare and soil on a keyboard was infinitely worse. But Dan didn't mind. The new room felt cool and new and exciting, and like he had done something in a time where everything else felt incorporeal.
Dan still couldn’t sleep, his roots were becoming horrendous and he still spent most days itching to do something new but at least he was now the proud owner of an eye-wateringly bright green room.
He called Kyle the day after he finished it, because if anyone could appreciate a vibrant shade of paint it was Kyle. Kyle, just as Dan had hoped, found it absolutely hilarious and gave his condolences to any future guests who would have their retinas burned out by the walls. He joked that it would be Dan’s next hair colour if the lockdown carried on for much longer. He also pointed out, while still chuckling, that Dan would now be able to film music videos from home because his walls doubled as green screens.
Dan started thinking about a film club at four am that night. The next morning, he started sketching out mindmaps and lists and scrawled ideas for films on scraps of paper in the kitchen while waiting for his banana bread to bake. The day after that he started sending out emails. Here was something to keep him busy. Here was a good use for his colourful new office.
And when the filmclub was up and running Dan was extremely pleased by the slight confusion the various guests displayed at being called by a guy with a bleach blonde tipped afro from a bright green Shrek room.