Going it alone
“I’M A TOUCHER AND FLIRTER, AND I DON’T CARE who you are,” says Maggie Duckworth. “I will talk to a log.” Before the arrival of COVID-19, Duckworth had a pretty sweet life. An events coordinator for a waste-management company in Chattanooga, Tenn., she traveled frequently for work and for fun. She had a large group of friends, a loving family she could visit in Atlanta and a cool apartment all to herself.
In December 2019, Duckworth, 43, was on a date when she snapped her Achilles’ heel. She was told to keep off her foot and had to be confined to her home while it healed. Just as she was ready to go out again, the pandemic hit. (However long the stay-at-home restrictions have been for you, they have been about four months longer for Duckworth.)
The torn tendon was painful, but people could still visit. The isolation of the pandemic was worse. “I wasn’t having any interactions with people; I wasn’t touching anyone; I wasn’t getting to tell my funny stories,” she says wistfully. “I didn’t have anyone to hug—or even high-five—for months.” Duckworth clearly remembers her last embrace before social-distancing measures were put in place. Finally able to walk with a cane, she went out for drinks with two friends, and they all went back to her place. “We hugged, and we were like, ‘O.K., we’ll hug in a year,’” she says. “We knew that was the last great night out.”
In May, Duckworth was laid off. She doesn’t blame her employer.
