A time will come, for us to shed our bubble wrap

Recently, I discovered that I could not see as far as I thought I could.

I was in the stalls at the Esplanade Theatre last month to see the Singapore Dance Theatre take the stage in From Here On, its first live performance since Covid-19 put the lights out in theatres around the globe.

It was by all accounts a very good seat - bang in the middle of a row, none of that craning your neck to see over other people's heads. There were nearly no other people. There were only 50 audience members in the 1,950-seat theatre - a full house, under the new safe distancing rules for pilot performances.

The Esplanade was practising "bubble-wrap seating", which sounds like a newfangled technology but really just means empty seats between you and the next audience member in any direction. I could not shake the image, however, of being bubble-wrapped against the perils of live theatre, like a fragile object.

I had not been in a theatre since March, which meant this was already the most thrilling ballet I had ever attended.

But as the dancers took to the stage for their first pas de deux, I grew alarmed. Their outlines were blurry. I struggled to bring their faces into focus. What I remembered as having been clear in the past was now indistinct.

I have - or had - nearly perfect eyesight, and so the notion of astigmatism unsettles me. People say it is inevitable with age, though I am not yet 30. What was more likely, I thought, was that while staying home throughout the circuit breaker period and phase one, my ability to see into the distance had fallen out of use.

During the pandemic, I experienced the rest of the world through a screen. There had been no need to focus on anything farther than the other end of the room.

Even when I returned to the field to report on the General Election, I continued to be attuned mostly to my immediate surroundings. If people were far away, that was all well and good. If they were up close, that was a problem, because it meant a safe distancing ambassador would soon be shouting at us.

There is nothing like a pandemic to narrow your view of the world. Everything shrinks to the bubble you have wrapped yourself in. If it is not immediate, it is not important; forget "in the distance", forget "down the line", forget the future. 2020 is cancelled. Best to stay still.

This is a year that has punished ambition and belied foresight. There are days when the sheer uncertainty of the future makes me wonder if there is any point in looking ahead now, or if I should just postpone major life decisions indefinitely. How can you produce a show, plan a wedding or plunge into a business venture when what lies before you is so unclear that at any step, you may have to call it off?

Even the tiniest dreams evoke hesitation. Holding a dance party, for instance. I dream of dancing with abandon in a crowd. The rush of adrenaline when your song comes on, the call and response of bodies in motion, the joy of moving to the same beat. Such a thing seems impossible now. One simply cannot see it happening.

"Will we ever dance together again in public?" I asked this of Berlin-based Singaporean dance artist Ming Poon, who years ago staged a public intervention in which he got strangers on the street to slow-dance with him. Next week, he will be bringing the lockdown edition of this work, The Intervention Of Loneliness, to the Esplanade's da:ns festival via Zoom.

His answer was a resounding yes. "If a little mask and 1.5m distance is enough to disconnect us, our practice is not deep enough," he told me - over Zoom, of course, everything nowadays happens over Zoom. "If I go out on the street now with a cardboard sign, I think I could still dance with someone."

I blinked at him in disbelief. He regarded me serenely. "In my head, it is still possible. We are more creative than we think."

It was still unfathomable to me, but people were doing it. They were opening up theatres and putting on live performances - albeit with such tight restrictions on audience numbers as to be financially untenable in the long run, but still. They could not see ahead but they were going to start moving anyway.

In From Here On, the dancer that really caught my eye was soloist Akira Nakahama as the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker.

There was a cautious reserve to her steps, as if she could not quite bring herself to believe that the ground would still be there on her next landing.

Yet her delight in dancing, in being there with us, was so palpable it infused her every turn and was visible to me across the space between us, even if my focus was unclear. She danced the way I felt.

I thought of Nakahama as I watched my sister prepare to return to New York last week, so that she could finish her degree.

This is the country with the highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world, so to say we were worried would be an understatement.

She was subdued as she packed, but determined. The virus had disrupted her education thus far, but no longer.

We had had six unprecedented months together after we fled the United States in March. It was the most time we had spent with each other since she left to pursue her studies.

In a pandemic, it is a privilege to have your loved ones in the same bubble as you, to be able to keep them within your sight. I had been afforded that privilege. I will not ever forget that. But my sister has stepped out of the bubble and vanished from my sight.

In the Shakespeare play Cymbeline, the princess Imogen laments that she could not watch her husband sail away: "I would have broke mine eye-strings, crack'd them, but/ To look upon him, till the diminution/ Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle."

If only the cracking of my eye-strings would keep my sister safe. But we could not have kept her still forever.

We are afraid of things we cannot see and afraid for those out of sight. It is possible we will never be able to see clearly, with certainty, again.

There will come a time for each of us, however, when we can no longer bubble-wrap our lives. We will have to leave the bubble and risk moving again - unseeing, fearful, but full of joy.