The Portrait Of Loneliness in Quarantine | Ficção

Miguel Reyes

Peru, 2020

SINOPSE

Start of quarantine, March 2020, Lima Peru. Mateo, a young painter unmotivated by his love break with his girlfriend, seeks a way out of his sentimental void. To achieve this, he accesses cyber dating sites in order to be able to forget those moments of relationship with his ex that don’t allow him to move on after having shared the last two years of his life with her. That is where he meets Lily, a beautiful Chinese who is also quarantined like him. Due to language difficulties, they manage to find the best way to communicate and establish a friendly relationship that makes each other find the perfect company to cope with the pandemic. Lily, a reserved and insecure woman, with a history of psychological abuse by her current fiance, from whom she is temporarily away due to quarantine, finds in Mateo the good treatment and care that she had forgotten for years.

After several months of encounters and days of cyber fun, after a conversation that will be revealing for both of them and that will allow both of them to make definitive decisions for their lives, Mateo realizes that his feelings for Lily go beyond a friendship and that he has found the love of his life through a computer. Lily, on the other hand, finally understands, through a wise advice from Mateo, that all her life she has been depending on many people and that her fears and mistreatment by her partner have not allowed her to really be her.

Mateo, determined not to let go of who he believes is the love of his life and misinterpreting Lily’s displays of affection, makes the decision to buy a plane ticket and thus surprise him in Shanghai, the city where she lives, immediately after he ends the quarantine set by the government and already has an end date due to the satisfactory decline in the proliferation of the virus. Lily without knowing what Mateo is planning and innocent that his words have moved in Mateo’s heart, makes the decision to break the commitment with her boyfriend and rebuild her life, but this time alone.