Self-portraits in Quarantine

Quarantine caught me in a weird place. As a newly arrived immigrant in Ireland, I had just moved to a house already occupied by another ten Brazilians and one Guatemalan. Everything was shared - the kitchen, the bathrooms, even my room - with people I had never met before. All of a sudden, we were all locked in and there was no escape. There was no leaving. I started to fade. My confinement was one of the loneliest times of my life. Yet, being alone was often the one thing I craved the most. I tried to shrink to get more space. I tried to merge with the house itself to avoid everyone else. There was never a time when I could be at ease in that place, surrounded by strangers. There was never a time I felt at home. It was often claustrophobic and suffocating. A loud and crowded solitude where I could never be myself, but fragments of me.