Scattered I

All of the trees are so white and fluffy and lonely.

Every day is another day subtracted from 14, but each day feels worse.

The air outside is full of oxygen and fright: clean and full and so, so quiet. Inside, there is everything: our jobs and our dogs and our entire small and shrinking lives.

Outside, the cars aren’t moving, the buses are barely running, the epicenter of the US epidemic is five stops away on the Acela, where most of my friends live.

In the middle of the night, I sat in bed quietly and listened to the ambulances somewhere out the window, shrieking in terror through the empty city.

Coughs are one of the most common psychosomatic symptoms, my therapist said last week. I still get scared every time I.

The highways in my brain have become dirt roads with tight hairpin turns and rocks that cause bumps and a heavy mist sitting on top of the fields that creep by out each window.

I have lost three stories in ten days, and it barely registered.

On FaceTime last night, my phone replaced the face of my friend with a series of vertical, tiny stripes of purple and pink and blue and red, and a couple (though not many) strands of green. I took a screenshot because it was a beautiful horror.

If no one will allow me to hold a stock in my hand, how am I supposed to believe they are real?

The mayors office told me on the phone that I needed to hold because so many people were calling, and I waited a half hour to beg someone to please shut down the city. The woman on the other end sounded so tired.

I have never had any clorox wipes.

Yesterday, I realized that if someone I love gets really very sick, I won’t be able to go be with them and make a plan and another layer of stress got stacked unstably on top of my already wobbly cake.

You do not have to be so productive. You can just.

Breathe in and out quietly to see if you feel okay.

On the fake island inside my video game, my island grows oranges naturally. I have planted coconuts and peaches and apples but they take time to grow. The time is real even if the trees are not.

The dog demands to be walked every day at 8 am and 2 pm, 6 pm and 11 pm.

Before the party on my computer on Saturday night, I filled a shot glass with tequila and licked my own hand to sprinkle with salt. I have lived in this apartment for almost six years and it was the first shot I’ve taken here.

I made bread on Sunday for the second week in a row just to have something to do.

There are two shelves bowing where I stack all of the books I have bought but not yet read, and not a single one of them can hold my attention right now. I hope soon to be able to read again.

The puppy in the apartment below me cries every day for hours after his owners go to work. He does not cry anymore.