Six Weeks Since Saturday Night

It’s six weeks ago I was out with a friend having a drink. I was home around midnight. I woke up the dog when I came in the back door, he stretched and sighed and wandered over to where he stands when he wants me to lift him on to the bed. We went to sleep and then the world collapsed.

The company I work for had already started encouraging people to work at home, they were a good two weeks ahead of the curve. They cancelled all travel the following week and emptied the building of everyone who didn’t have to be there. I think that’s just the team that cares for and feeds the servers, but I’m not sure. I work with a team of six and I have seen the little guest cottage our program manager now uses as his office. I have seen our marketing person’s neatly made bed. Yesterday, the most buttoned up guy on our team, the guy who was until very recently in the army reserves, showed up on the conference call in a tank top and a backwards baseball cap, so even he’s gone full on “fuck it.”

The first time I went to the supermarket post plague, everyone was twitchy and scared, staff and shoppers alike veering away from each other like reversed magnets. There are now one way signs for each aisle, and plexiglass sheilds in front of the registers, and nearly everyone is wearing a mask and gloves. Though the guy stocking the snack aisle was not, nor was the guy in the coffee aisle. Two trips in I saw a group of people chatting out front, none of them masked, all standing in a tight circle, and I felt afraid for them. In the car I peeled off my gloves and my mask and slathered my hands in santizer. The first three trips I made to get groceries had me so stressed out I had to go back to bed afterwards. The last time I went was a little easier on me, though the paper goods aisle was still decmiated and for some reason there was hardly any dish soap. I do not understand what people are buying and why. I came home with gin and chocolate chips.

The spring has been so beautiful, the skies so blue, the trees so full of flowers. When I walk the dog through my neighborhood, people cross the street to get away from me. If my route for the day takes me to the stair climb, any one else taking the same route will stop at the landing, eight or ten flights down, so they do not have to pass me in the narrow space between the hand rails. Sometimes my dog will be allowed to sniff another dog, but any humans monitoring that interaction will be the combination of two leash-lengths apart.

On a particularly glorious weekend I decided to hop on my bike and ride down to the beach. I wanted to see what was open. I was hoping that certain signs of life would make me feel better, but in fact, the reverse was true. The cupcake place is closed. The bakery has takeout, but limited hours. The bar I love, the one just down the hill, the red neon is switched off. Some businesses have the shades drawn, others have papered over the windows. My neighborhood hasn’t gone full boarding up, but I’ve driven through other parts of the city and plywood covers the windows of many bars and restaurants. The beach park was closed, but there were still too many people out, I had to weave my bike around entire families, kids and the dog included, spilling out of the car to visit this place they weren’t supposed to be because the city had closed it. On a particularly narrow stretch of road there was a crush of cars and bikes and pedestrians as though it were just another day and I regretted that I had gone for a ride at all. I worried that I had exposed myself and the sight of the business district so quiet on a perfect afternoon made me so blue.

I have seen a handful of friends in person. I sat on a porch drinking whiskey, in a garden drinking tea, in a park not drinking anything, just talking with a friend who lives nearby. It’s been good to visit, but it is not enough. All this is supplemented with a steady dose of online gatherings. There is a Friday lunch with some girlfriends. An intermittent happy hour with some Seattle friends. Lots of text conversation on What’s App and GChat and iMessage and what else have you. “You’re not alone,” one of us always says. Then I close the connection and I am alone.

Last November, I asked my husband of more than 20 years for a divorce. Maybe it was October, I don’t know. He had been gone since June but in 2019, we’d spent a total of six weeks together. I was so tired of being alone. I had decided I was going to date and, holding my breath, put myself on a handful of online dating sites. It was going badly but badly in an a mildly amusing kind of way. In December I met a guy I started seeing regularly but it unraveled in the early spring. I was not particularly ready to try again, but given it had taken me three months to meet anyone I wanted to see twice, I figured I should just go for it, get back out there. A week after I put my online profiles back up, the governor activated our stay at home order.

Being on my own comes quite natural to me. I am good at it. I am content to cook for myself. My dog makes sure that I get some exercise daily, and I am motivated enough to augment that with something — a yoga practice, running my errands by bicycle, I had been going to the gym four days a week. My house is no more or less a mess than it was pre-plague. I have not had an office job since, when was that? The early 00s? Living overseas taught me how to build and maintain friendships online. In a weird twist, even my bout with severe depression has given me a useful skill. I can actually accept that feeling anxious and depressed is completely appropriate. If there are days when I can not deal, I understand that the reason I can not deal is that everything is completely, utterly fucked up, not because there is something wrong with me.

My county has a Covid-19 testing program; I was able to participate. While waiting for my results I pondered what I wanted them to be. If I was positive, perhaps I would be carrying but immune because I am not sick. I could give plasma and help find a cure, perhaps. If I was negative, it would mean I had not been exposed. It took three days to get the results; I’m negative. This changes exactly nothing because every time I leave my house I am at risk of exposure. Anyone I might leave my house to visit is in the same boat. My negative test gets me no closer to inviting you to my kitchen table. It doesn’t reopen the bookstore or the bar. It does not get me a handshake or a hug.

To be alone right now is to feel the absolute weight of solitude. I have seen a lot of “at least you’re not…” rhetoric out there, but it’s not helpful. At least you don’t have to home school your kids. At least you don’t have to listen to your parents complaining about their ailments. At least. Indeed there are many terrible situations — at least you do not live with an abusive partner tops the list in my mind. I am in a very good place. I still have income. I live in a neighborhood where it is easy to get outside. I am healthy; I even have a test to prove it. I live in a state where the governor is a sensible and thoughtful leader. I am fine. And it is not a contest to see who has it the worst. This sucks for everyone, universally, in its own ways.

The things I miss are too numerous to list. They range from the frivolous to the mundane, from things I crave in my head to things I crave from deep in my gut. I understand the cost of giving into any and all of these desires. As of today, more than 50,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. I would prefer not to be one of those people, or to contribute in any way to making that number higher.

My sacrifices are small. I feel the weight of every single one.