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The diary of a woman longing for community in a crowded downtown in pandemic times, when casual intimacies are forbidden.
Novelist Rebecca Rosenblum lives in St. James Town, Toronto — the most densely populated square kilometre in all of Canada. When the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns arrive, she’s cut off from colleagues, friends, and family, and not allowed to go near neighbours. As the world constricts, Rebecca keeps a weird and worried diary online — a love letter both to the outside world that she misses so desperately, and the little world inside St. James Town that she can see from home.
As Rebecca watches and wonders from inside her box in the sky, her diary entries mix an account of a tough time in a tough place with joyful goofiness and moments of unexpected compassion.
It’s shocking how much the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic feel like ancient history. In these near-daily dispatches from the lockdown era, Rosenblum attempts to pin herself to the earth during a moment of global unmooring. In doing so, she provides an honest and very human accounting of a time that is already being erased from our collective memories.
In early March 2020, as the first wave of the pandemic closed in and big city life shifted in estranging ways, Rebecca Rosenblum began to chronicle the changes in herself and others in journal entries on social media. As we acquired new vocabulary, adjusted to new routines, and learned to cope with losses of all kinds, she probed personal and collective anxieties and conundrums. During walks through a deserted city, she conceived of herself as an eye, but she was also the beating heart of a community trying to finds its way during a collective trauma. In compilation, this diary is a record of where we’ve been and who we’ve been under unknowable and stressful circumstances. To read These Days Are Numbered is to witness a deeply curious, compassionate, and humane mind at work.
Rosenblum is an absolute master of tapping into human emotions and relationships, and her observations into human nature, while so very insightful, are also so extremely kind and lovely.