Illustration by Janet Mac,
Updated 16:44, Dec. 16, 2020 | Published 14:14, Dec. 16, 2020
The desk was tiny, wooden, and had no legs—it was meant to be screwed into a corner. When I was done using it, I could fold it flat against my bedroom wall and hide it behind my full-length mirror. In my ecstatic state buying it online, I may have even called it beautiful.
It was only the end of March and, a few weeks in, the pandemic already felt interminable. My partner and I were both working from the one-bedroom apartment we rent in Vancouver—I as a graduate student and teaching assistant, he as a journalist. I hadn’t opened a book or touched my thesis in weeks. I needed the proverbial room of one’s own, one with a door silencing my partner’s eating sounds and diaphragmatic work voice. I thought the desk would be my ticket back to normalcy via productivity.