Like most people living in non-island nations, my children and I contracted COVID recently. It was our first time, which I shall mark as an accomplishment, but it came with a ten-day quarantine from their school. Between the two of them and their lingering symptoms, however, those ten days ended up clocking in at fourteen.
Then, of course, their return to school was followed immediately by the Storm of the Century™, sending them back home for three additional snow days.
And this coming Monday is a scheduled e-learning day. So when it’s all said and done, we will have been home for three full weeks.
And I will be a rattling, dry husk of my former self.
Under these conditions, writing has been SOMEWHAT DIFFICULT. I don’t have deep thoughts about what isolation does to humans. I don’t have an analysis of how we move forward. I don’t even have fake facts about February, which just keeps coming back year after God-forsaken year.
But I can offer you what I’ve managed to doodle each day as my kids sat down to drag spelling words around and I tried not to run straight through the nearest piece of drywall.
I started drawing somewhere around Day 3 or 4, which was also when I realized I couldn’t smell anything.
Then I realized I couldn’t taste anything, either, which led to some ruminating about who might take this opportunity to poison me. Later, I replaced those thoughts with a Final Destination movie of ways I might inadvertently poison myself.
A couple of days later, I switched my tea to coffee and chased my malfunctioning senses until I gave myself heart palpitations.
The coffee tasted like rice.
After we’d been inside for seven days, a new episode of The Friendship Onion posted. AT LAST. A pinprick of light in the cave darkness of quarantine. I looked at the thumbnail I’d been waiting for all week, clicked the link, and beheld Dom and Billy’s exceptionally appealing faces.
And I felt nothing.
This was the first indication that the pleasure centers in my brain had been compromised. Even formerly reliable sources of dopamine—podcasts, walks, cookies—couldn’t get me more than ten feet up the first hill on the roller coaster of joy.
It persists, and it’s been unpleasant.
I spent a couple of days trying to shame myself into cheering up.
Then I just leaned into it.
By Day 10, I knew enough time had passed for the Earth to have undergone a complete colonization by aliens, apes, or zombifying viruses, and that I might be its last remaining human inhabitant. I braced myself for the possibilities.
On Day 11, someone hijacked my sketchpad during Don’t Talk to Mom Unless Someone Has Been Mortally Wounded Time, and I was not amused because I have lost my ability to be amused by things.
I resorted to some old tricks from the toddler days, but eating Ghirardelli in a darkened pantry hits different when everything still tastes like boiled starch.
Not sure what days any of the other doodles are from. I’ve been making conversation with the parlor palm and have lost all sense of linear time.
I hope you’re all well. If you’re in quarantine reading this, I hope you take it easy on yourself. If you’re an alien, ape, or zombie reading this, I hope you’ll at least be benevolent overlords. We humans could use a break.
