Thinking about time is important. Our understanding of time can galvanise us, propelling us into action, or it can impede progress and positive change. Time can make us feel disorientated, fragmented, and untethered, but it can also provide new anchor points and insight into ourselves and our place in the world. Moments of crisis throw society into stark relief. If you don’t like what you see, now is the time to change it.

All our lockdowns are different versions of the same restrictions, from flats ringed with police to suburban houses and beyond. We’re trapped with each other without the possibility of solitude. As the online world takes over many of our social rituals, we are also lonely without privacy.

If caring is insurrectionary, and insurrection is a multiplicity of interrelated acts of care, it follows that insurrection is built out of care itself and an understanding of its revolutionary and transgressive potential. Care is therefore always militant.

Since we were forced to make all our social interactions virtual, things have felt more real than ever. It turns out it’s not that difficult to tell the difference between the outside world and a screen. Far from an acceleration towards virtual reality, COVID-19 has felt like the return of something real. The dissolution of a fantasy.

If there is a better word than war for what we are experiencing, it is care. What matters now is how a society cares for all its members, especially the most vulnerable. How a culture values the workers who are most essential, who do the bulk of that labour of care. As the cracks widen in the world’s economy, we are offered a chance to recalculate these values. There is a possibility that our mutual care, our shared vulnerability, will remain visible in future.

I wonder how we might hold a distinct diasporic politics that can contain a vast plurality of political and ethical obligations. The kind that advocates for social transformation and justice in both our new homes and our ancestral lands, in spite of temporal and spatial distance.

Nazism, and this place above all, operates a double annihilation. Firstly, the crime is committed. People are violated, undone, with every device that malice can conceive, and then they killed in ways people outside can scarcely imagine. Then, secondly, one destroys the evidence.

For those of us in the diaspora, it’s impossible to look at these images and see only the masses, the revolutionaries, or the wretched of the earth. It’s impossible to see fictionalised, fetishised caricatures, because we also see ourselves, in one way or another. We see ourselves in those we look at. We imagine being there, but we also imagine having always been there.

Translated literally, Shanghai means ‘city on the sea’. It was the first city opened to foreign involvement under British imperialism, and Western influences are present in even the most sacred spaces. Remnants of European architecture look grey next to the yellow ginkgo trees. The colours bloom slowly, then all at once. My childhood fascination turns into a feeling I recognise as longing.

This is my home but not my country. When I visited Sicily for the first time as an adult, in the 1990s, I understood that maybe it was my country but it could never be my home. The fig tree is oblivious to its origins, to its alien status but for me, this belonging and not belonging is the source of all my questions, all my writing.

The general condition of malaise among a growing class of securely but meaninglessly employed people fosters contempt for genuine work, withdrawal from substantive forms of public life, a sense that things cannot change, and an ambivalence about the world bordering on nihilism.

When my mum and dad realised I was deaf, they were sitting in the cinema with their hands covered in popcorn grease watching Mr Holland’s Opus – a film about a music teacher with a deaf child. They realised that I probably shouldn’t have slept through Mr Holland’s grand orchestral bangers. That trip to the cinema was followed by multitudinous hearing tests, hearing aid fittings and many trips to Taralye, which is the oral language centre for deaf children.

Imagine if we could collectively agree that we no longer had enough space on ourselves to store the externalities of our rampant material desires.

People adopt different styles of packing when leaving a place. There are the light-packers who just throw in a change of clothes, grab their smartphones and are good to go. These ones are eager to leave, discard accumulated memories, and make new memories in a new place.

When I first met Andrew, in the mid-1990s, he had already won the Vogel award for Praise and had written a play, Bait. Working alongside David Berthold, Bait was the result of Andrew’s time as a resident writer at the Queensland Theatre Company. As fate would have it, the company passed on producing it. Andrew’s time at the company was also over, and so that may well have been it for Andrew’s involvement in the theatre.

I’d been using the internet a lot. I wondered, was I addicted? Behavioural scientists have linked internet addiction with social isolation. The three subtypes of addiction are: online gaming, sexual preoccupations, and excessive emailing or texting involving a constant compulsion to message or check messages. Did I have any of these? I did check my messages a lot. They were always disappointing. There was no message, ever, that could be big enough to stop up the gap inside me.