You stare at the ceiling, the midmorning sun filtered through the blinds in your bedroom. What woke you up? A sound? You hear it again: the sound of a creature, gray and rotund and starving, galloping full tilt through your apartment. It gets louder and louder and then the leap! to your bed and he stops on a dime, staring at you, eyes wide and blazing golden-green, this living creature that, bizarrely, lives in your apartment with you. And just as fast, he spins and jumps off, trots back to the kitchen at full gallop. You stare at the ceiling for a few minutes. Huh. There are a few patches of discoloration from where you hung your phone to take photos (the silly kind, not the salacious kind) and the tape peeled the paint off. I have time to repaint my ceiling, you think absently.

What day is it? Friday? Sunday? This all feels, oddly enough, like your years living in Los Angeles, just on a smaller scale. You loved in Los Angeles for 12 years without even feeling like time was passing. Without strong seasons, the time felt like it was passing strangely or not at all; every day was another sunny day more beautiful than the day before it. And just like that, your second alarm clock goes off: in the other room, you hear Ned start to retch vomit onto your ivory flokati rug. “I’M UP” you yell, leaping to move him to a spot on the wood floor.

Later, it’s time to eat your stupid little tuna salad wrap with spinach, and take your stupid little walk. You mentally keep a tally of everything you touch and its risk level. Have a face itch and successfully use the fabric of your sweatshirt arm to scratch it? Safe. Spring bloom you stop to smell? Safe (and bonus, you still have your sense of smell!). Doorknob to your apartment building? Not safe, and now you can never touch anything ever again until your wash your hands.

Your poor, poor hands. They don’t understand, they were just doing their best and now you drown them at every chance. They’ve aged 10 years in just two months and my god, you’ve gone through so much lotion.

You’ve learned now to smize with the best of them, since nobody can see your facial expressions when you’re wearing your mask. For that matter, you can’t see anyone else’s, since every exhale creates a cumulus cloud of vapor that blows up your face, into your eyes and fogs your lenses like a winter windshield when the car starts.

But these are necessary inconveniences compared to the minor inconvenience of, say, being dead. Every day you read the news and you grasp the stories of hope, the stories of courage, the recovery stories. You can’t really fault how anyone else is going through this, since it’s all just traumatic and weird and unprecedented. The world is paused, the world is moving on, the world forgot its keys, the world says “don’t make me come back there.”

Your friend Nick asks if you want to go for a walk to the grocery store and it’s perfect timing, you have to go anyway. You’ve switched from your usual routine of going every day (people say “Oh, that’s very European”, so yes, I agree I am v worldwise and continental), to going a couple times a week, to now going once a week and leaving with your arms burdened with hardtack and pemmican and jerky like an old timey person. It’s a gorgeous day and you and he make it a photo shoot (while about 10 feet away from each other) as you run into flower after flower blooming its little spring heart out. You both spend a good five minutes at a tree whose bright pink blooms have all dropped to the sidewalk, making it look for half a block like pink snowfall. Did flowers even exist before Instagram?

(Okay so rewind and first of all I’m so, so very proud I pulled the word pemmican out of my rusty, dusty brain, but also upon researching this its like, the ultimate nutritious food packed with energy. Historically, it’s a part of indigenous North American diets, and is still widely made today. I’m going down a rabbit hole researching pemmican recipes and it might be to me what pumpkin bread has been to other people during this.)

You finally get to the grocery store. See, you and Nick didn’t go to the closeby smaller grocery store. No no, you went to the jumbo-airplane hangar that is Fred Meyer. You split up and wander the glossy aisles, past the crowd-control stanchions set up by the empty toilet paper aisle, past the clothing section with overstuffed shelves; after all, what are we getting dressed for anymore? You end up in the produce section, and everyone is doing their best to physically distance but also get their goddamn vegetables but also be as “Portland polite” as possible. Under your mask, no one can see you making the thin lipped flat smile that people only make they’re doing their very best to be civil but ALSO IT WAS MY TURN AT THE ZUCCHINI NOODLES KAREN.

For the most part people are wearing masks, which is a relief. For the most part, people are distancing. This week’s New Weird Thing is taking a corner too fast and almost running into another person doing the same, you both laugh in relief as you both narrowly avoid touching each other in your silly ballet with the stranger, but then a cloud passes over as you realize that this awkward exchange, simple and goofy, is now risky. Even the eruption of klutzy laughter that burst through your mask could be sinister. This is new and this is haunting.

It’s almost as haunting as your dreams. Your dreams are bonkers. Sometimes if you drink wine too soon before bed they are nightmares, but most of the time they are just dreams turned up to level 11 on the stereo system. If they’re fantasy, they’re literally painted with a Lisa Frank pallet, and if they’re science fiction (which they often are you nerd) they’re a robot and explosion filled Blade Runner action-fest. You’re on the bridge of the Enterprise and your boss is at the navigation station, your cat is at the helm in a little Starfleet uniform, a distant ex is in charge of communication (IRONIC), and fucking 45 is there in Spock ears. And this is one of the more boring ones.

You also really loved the alien abduction one, waking up inside your dream to the little grey dude with almond-shaped eyes just standing there staring at you from your bedroom doorway, your cat hissing as you rose off the bed. Thanks a lot for that dream.

But your art, you keep at it, you find ways to do it alone instead of with others, it keeps striking a chord with people, there’s something in there that’s helpful to people. You take this as a sign of encouragement but you still get restless to switch up your formula. In the same way that the stay at home order is affecting time, it’s also affecting your art. It’s weird, but it’s also a good thing. You think. For now. You’re finding new ways to look at this new world, while also distracting people and giving them something to laugh at. And in a way, that’s the daily lesson. Finding new ways to fit into the world, finding new ways to show up for life. Grateful for your gifts and your job, celebrating that your family and friends are still safe and healthy, and acknowledging your privilege in this time.

You go to bed. Slowly, subtly but steadily the surfaces in your room bubble and split. A tendril comes through the veneer of your dresser, a bookshelf sports a vine wrapping around a leg. The growth rustles and surges and stretches in a great rubbery sound and covers everything, and then suddenly all sprouts petals in every imaginable color. The petals flop open in huge ridiculous clusters as the flowers all bloom at once, bloom upon bloom, they keep growing, they cover the bed, they lift it from underneath, they envelop you, they are cloying and warm, even the Murder Hornets tap at the glass of your bedroom window and wave and their little decapitating mandibles form smiles. Everything is here to keep you safe, everything is here to surround you, everything is here to cushion your fall.