It’s your usual routine: Get out of bed. Make coffee and breakfast. Breakfast is the same thing day after day, a two egg omelette with spinach, mushrooms, and cheese. Bike to work. Change out of your bike clothes and into your uniform. Read your emails. Your routine defines you, it grounds you, it’s the bread to whatever is in your sandwich that day (turkey. It’s always turkey).

On your way in to work one day you notice that the shopping mall seems abandoned. Coworkers are huddled around the computer screen. They look up when you walk in the door, then back down to the news. There are few clients that day. This is how it starts, and each day after that is different and strange from the day before, maybe forever.

That Monday is your Saturday, and late in the afternoon you get the word from your boss. “We’re closing it down.” You live the closest to the store, you volunteer to bike in and help close it. You think then that it’ll just be for a couple weeks. You follow the checklist that the company gives you to make sure everything’s buttoned up before you leave. You set the alarm, lock the door, and walk away, as people in other stores devoid of customers crane their heads to see what’s happening.

In the next few days you text your parents every day, FaceTime a couple friends. You participate in work Zoom calls at the beginning and the end of your workdays, and sometimes these are the highlight of your day: seeing familiar faces in their own spaces that you never saw before is reassuring, humanity is doing the best it can to stay connected. The world is still spinning even if the routine is lost. You wonder if they notice you’re putting on the same button-down shirt day after day that you take off and change into your sweatshirt and sweatpants immediately after.

You’re even more Extremely Online than you were before, which is what it is (insert shrug emoji here). You obsessively check your mailbox every day, probably to the delight of your mailcarrier. See, you usually wait days, even weeks before emptying your mailbox. In the past, you sheepishly open the door and your mail for the prior weeks is packed in there, roughly in the shape of a brick and the density of a quantum singularity. You chip away at it with your pickaxe like an old timey gold prospector until it falls out, shedding bills and junk mail and New Yorkers. Then you scoop it up and sort out the contents in your kitchen over your recycling bag.

You notice a new, specific politeness on the dating apps. Although Tinder and Scruff are actively discouraging people from meeting up in real life until after the crisis, the men on there have a newfound gentleness and civility with each other that very much did not exist before. Maybe it’s just you, but it seems everyone is being a little nicer when the stakes there are lower. Even the dick pics seem more artful, more tastefully composed.

You decide to brave the grocery store, see if they have any had sanitizer or disinfectant wipes or toilet paper. The first two you never had, but the third you had just bought before the crisis bloomed. You’ve been staring at your dwindling supply of toilet paper for a week and a half now, considering getting a bidet attachment. It seems like all the bathroom tissue on the planet was raptured suddenly, God called it all back to his side, some Charmins are too beautiful for this world. You look around your apartment to decide what you will use if worse comes to worst. You narrow the choices down to the top three options:

1. Some old dinner napkins. The ancient built-in cabinets you keep them in are made of wood that’s musty, and they smell permanently of butt anyway. This is a good choice as a TP backup, but then where would you keep them while waiting to wash them?
2. Your cat. Ned’s fur is pretty soft, sure, and he’s dark grey so you’d barely see it. The potential for him to get upset and claw you in your most tender bits is too great though, but this will still stay in the running if all other options are exhausted.
3. The roll of bamboo-rayon paper towels under your sink. You found these at the grocery store one day years ago (okay that’s an exaggeration) and you’ve had the same roll since. Why? Because you can wash and reuse each square of it when you use it, up to like ten times. It’s pretty much an inexhaustible roll of paper towels, like something out of The Phantom Tollbooth to demonstrate the mathematical concept of infinity. Each time you use one to clean up a mess and then rinse it out you feel so self righteous and proud, like the gif of that smug cheerleader come to life. Greta Thunberg applauds you softly and politely as you accept your trophy for doing The Least, and then her expression darkens as she slowly stops clapping. Her brow furrows, she glares in Swedish. You follow her gaze behind you to a pile of your Mylar balloons. Oh. Yes. Those.

Anyway, you’ll wipe your butt with those after you poop when you run out of TP.

While some things get depleted, still others multiply: things like Scam Likely calls (why, why is there not a drag queen named Scam Likely?), emails from corporations to tell you exactly what they’re doing to combat the virus (if you hear the carefully parsed phrase “…during these unprecedented times…” one more time), and numerous trips to your fridge to see if anything sweet is in there yet (there is not).

You start a creative project, because you have to to keep the lambs from screaming, Clarice. You think back to just a few days before, when you’re in your friend Andrew’s car on the way to do a balloon piece, thinking of how many things you’re touching, knowing the two of you aren’t six feet apart. The two of you are quieter than usual, an efficient ballet of tearing up tape and rolling it, sticking balloons to a wall, and then taking them down and stuffing them into trash bags to reuse next time. You’re both never aware of how much the two of you are touching the same thing as you are this day.

On the way back to drop the trash bags of balloons and yourself off, Andrew clears his throat.

“I think maybe we should rethink how we do these shoots.”

“Yeah,” you agree, already on the same page. “I was thinking that too.”

The thoughts go through your mind: maybe if we wear gloves? Maybe if I find hand sanitizer on the black market and get a bottle? Maybe if I Clorox wipe each balloon down? In the end, the two of you decide tacitly that maybe the risk is too great and you need to shut these type of shoots down for now. You’ll be doing them solo for awhile, if you don’t think of another way entirely to do them.

Your dad sends a text a couple days later. “So, they decided to cancel my surgery next month.” You flash back to a month or so before: his text saying he’d been peeing blood for weeks, him scheduling the surgery, you finding a flight to get out to him in New Mexico. You woke up the day of the surgery disoriented after flying in at midnight the night before. You took him there, waited with him a bit, then he shooed you away to wait for him at home. After awhile, the doctor called.

“Oh hi it’s Mike, I’m Jim’s son.”

“Hi Mike, so we got all of it we think. We’ll follow up in a week at his appointment to make sure.”

“Oh great. So uh, it was a cyst, huh?” This is what your dad had told you.

“It’s bladder cancer.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize that. Uh, is it, uh, benign?”

Sharply: “Well, no, it’s literally cancer.” She softened a little: “It’s like skin cancer, that would be the closest thing I could compare it to. And if we got all of it, there’s a very good chance it won’t come back.”

You pick him up, are there the days after his surgery. Later, you fly back to Portland. And weeks later, now, you’re getting the text that his follow up surgery is cancelled.

“But how can they do that? It’s not elective, it’s to follow up on your bladder cancer surgery.”

“The second surgery is just a follow up. I guess we’ll see what the doctor says.”

If my dad knew how to send emojis, he would have sent a shrugging one. He’s chill and easy going in ways that I most certainly am not. In the end though, a part of me would almost be relieved that my father in his 80s wouldn’t go to the hospital right now if he didn’t absolutely have to.

You sleep more and more. You sleep and then sleep in the next morning, then later and later each day. In the timelapse of you sleeping it shows the sun rising outside and setting, faster and faster. Ned stays on the bed the entire time and waits for you to get up and feed him with an increasingly annoyed expression on his face. Outside, the days pass faster and faster, until finally one bright morning you wake up, the whole world wakes up, you go outside and it is a party, it is a miracle, every day is summer and the human race survived (although sobered and shadowed by the people who passed, and the incompetent president who let it happen), people are in the street hugging strangers and their neighbors and long lost friends and we are all crying and we change it all, everything will be different now, it must be, we won’t let it get this bad again we are sorry we promise we promise we promise.

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