I live in South Korea, where the number of reported Covid-19 cases is fast approaching 8,000 (at time of publishing). The school where I teach has been closed for three weeks, and we’ve been advised by local authorities to avoid leaving our homes. So I’ve been inside a lot. Like, a lot. It is in the deepest depths of this isolation that I came to find Outlander on Netflix.

I watched the four available seasons in only five days, and I’ve never been so detached from reality in my entire life—or so contented to be so. Before watching Outlander, fear of catching the virus while abroad had consumed my every waking thought. And after? Well, in the shower, walking down the street, as I fall asleep at night, the show’s title song has its claws in my consciousness... Sing me a song of a lass that is gone, say could that lass be I?

On top of the feeling that I, a lass, am gone, and that it could be I, far across the sea in South Korea, Outlander has provided me with a different kind of distance in this time of global panic. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve spent the last week on an adventure through 18th-century Scotland with my heart’s truest desire: Jamie Fraser.

Outlander tells the story of Claire, a British war nurse who’s on her honeymoon in 1945 in Scotland when she accidentally catapults herself back in time 200 years. She finds herself in the thick of the Scottish rebellion against English occupation, and the show carries on from there for four seasons (season five premiered a few weeks ago).

Soon after she arrives, Claire meets Jamie. He’s a young revolutionary who she helps heal time and time again as he fields stabs, gunshots, dislocations, and the like. We get to know his shirtless injured body well, along with his tragic backstory, effortless good nature, innocence, bravery, humor, and eye color.

Of course it’s inevitable that Jamie and Claire fall in love, etc. Flash forward a few short days, and I find myself desperately trying to pirate the new season online between corona-masked food runs.

It’s not just that Sam Heughan (Jamie) is hot. He definitely is, but there are plenty of attractive men on TV. What’s got me hooked on Outlander and on James Fraser in particular is he and Caitriona Balfe (Claire)’s depiction of being in love. The sex scenes are no ordinary sex scenes (and I don’t just mean how long they go on or how much they show us). They transcend the flashy, erotic spectacle present in other period dramas.

Watching Jamie and Claire make love reminds me of a time when I felt that way about someone. Jamie and Claire’s relationship is that of lust driven by love. It’s the kind of love that makes you feel like if you don’t do it with that person—that person specifically—right then and there, you’ll drop dead.

The acting is spot on—the eye contact, the way Jamie smiles or doesn’t smile at just the right moments, the particular way they interlace their fingers and how the camera catches it. In a 2019 New York Comic Con panel, Heughan recalled a scene he and Balfe had recently filmed in which they “made love without actually making love.” That got laughs and blushes from the crowd and the other panelists, but I get it, Sam. I get it. 

There’s something to be said for the director and actors’ skill in being able to recreate that kind of intimacy so well that pathetic little lonelyhearts like me can watch it and remember feeling so specifically the same way. Jamie asks Claire after their wedding night, “Is it usual, what it is between us when I touch you?” and Claire, who’s left another marriage behind in the 20th century, says, “It’s often something like this… But no. This isn’t usual. It’s different.”

I’ve never so masochistically slipped into non-reality as I have watching Outlander. Masochistic because it literally hurts to watch Claire and Jamie together when you used to have that with someone, but don’t anymore. And non-reality not because it’s fantasy, wartime period drama—no. Rather, my own personal non-reality: unusually true love.

My best friend from home, Alexis, noticed a change in me. Pre-Outlander, I was completely preoccupied by the Covid-19 outbreak. I found myself on phone call after phone call explaining that it wasn’t fear of dying that was getting to me, but rather the uncertainty of my new situation; I’m alone in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, every day my phone blasts emergency alerts at me that I can’t read, and with school being closed, I lost the anchor that held together my everyday, leaving me floundering. 

Post-Outlander me, on the other hand, spent my time leaving Alexis voicemail after voicemail explaining how much I loved Jamie Frazer, how my soul’s true capacity for obsession had been realized, how watching the highlands on TV was reconnecting me to my Scottish ‘McAdams’ heritage and that’s how I knew that I was meant to make this fake man my lover. 

She told me to go for it. It was better to care so much for this imaginary world than to fear the real one. What’s more, it was far better to feel the very human, reflective loneliness of heartbreak than it was to feel the loneliness of quarantine.

I’ve binge-watched a lot of TV in my time, but never have I been so attached nor so grateful to a show as I have Outlander. Whoever’s out there worrying about this mess, or perhaps wants to remember what it feels like to be loved, go listen to “The Skye Boat Song.” Escape for a little while. Let Jamie Frazer and his kilt carry you away from all of your problems.

Julianne currently lives in Seoul, South Korea where she teaches elementary schoolers phrases like "slice of life" to describe Judy Blume books. Before she became a virus-fearing hermit, she enjoyed swing dancing, hiking, and living in different countries. In Germany, a certain alpaca named Cristalo is waiting for her to someday return.