Staying Put

My father wants me to come home with my family to ride out the quarantine. Really what I think he’s demanding of me is that I position myself to die with them if worst comes to worst. My very premature birth left me with a particularly finicky set of lungs and my family won’t let me forget that I’m at risk. Still, I’ve heard stories of people being silent carriers of the virus and don’t want to infect them just in case- “I’m staying put,” I assure him. I do not intend on dying, but I guess if I were to, I would probably want to die with them. I’ve never had that thought before. I don’t intend on dying. 

It’s been a few days since the shelter-in-place order was handed down from our respective state governments and my father is still going to work every day. My mother is too.  In a tizzy, she sent a video of some doctor rambling titled How Coronavirus Kills Us. I decide that I don’t want to know and click out of the message. Directing my attention to my New York Times frontpage to escape the notifications, it reads “Opinion: It’s Time to Talk About Death.” I don’t want to know about that either. Sitting down on my bed, I inhale, hold my breath for a few seconds, exhale, and repeat, repeat, repeat until the tension in my chest dissipates some. 

For now, I’m stuck in my cramped apartment with my roommate. He’s a farm boy from somewhere along the Ohio border. In the days or maybe weeks that we’ve been holed up together, we’ve gotten pretty cozy. We read the news and I ask why he’s still seeing friends and going to the grocery store and whatnot when we have all we need right here. He says he thinks he could recover from this virus and anyways, he doesn’t fear death- he anxiously awaits it. He won’t tell me what he thinks comes afterwards. We’ve slept in the same bed for eight or nine days now. I think we’re scared to be alone. 

I’ve been drinking a lot throughout this pandemic. In the face of an existential threat, no amount of inhale, hold it, exhale really works to dissolve the root of the anxiety lodged deep in me. It’s in my throat, in my stomach, in my hands sometimes, certainly in my lungs. In between body scans spent searching for a tickle in my throat or perhaps a sign of fever, I dull the panicked glare with screen time, quiet the noise with the sound of my roommate plucking his newly acquired banjo in the room across the hall, try to replace the structure of a real life by compulsively taking at least one long shower a day, mix myself up a whiskey ginger. My hair has never been cleaner. My liver, not so much. 

My roommate and I got into it this morning. He tore into me for checking the New York Times, thinks it’s a harbinger of societal decline and a symptom of a broader commercial monopoly at play. My brand-new subscription born of quarantine boredom is indicative of some inherent character flaw, and I’m therefore complicit in the modernization of the world which he loathes so. Apparently I fell asleep with my phone next to me last night; this, too, is evidence of my participation in the modernization game. I strap my sneakers on to go for a walk just as he launches into a new harangue about my life being “unexamined.” I consider whether this quarantine is making people lose their grip on reality altogether only to remember that this isn’t the first time we’ve argued like this.

Returning after a few hours spent freezing on a stoop a few blocks down, I shuffle into my apartment expecting to find him in his room. He’s gone, but a crumpled piece of lined paper has appeared on my bed while I was out, along with my two favorite sweaters of his. The note reads “SORRY” in huge, sloppy handwriting. I can’t help but try to retrace his steps and imagine him grabbing the nearest writing implement in a panic to get the words out of his head. I’m not sure where he went, but the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end as if he’s about to walk in the door at any minute, back into our quarantine daydream to forget it all ever happened. I don’t know if he’s sorry for what he said or just scared I’ll never want to speak to him again. I remind myself that we’re stuck here until this all blows over and that I couldn’t avoid him if I wanted to. If.  

I place the sweaters in the basket by my bed and sit atop my duvet staring at them. He had asked for the orange one back just last night after I proposed that maybe we could sleep in our own beds just this once. It’s got some holes in the hem that I once offered to sew up and a colorful patch on the chest from somewhere in the Upper Peninsula. Brownies are usually my peace offering of choice, but I guess this will do. I’m just not sure I can will myself to accept it. I inhale, hold it, exhale, and wonder when he’s coming back. Repeat, repeat, repeat. 

Published initially in Fritz Swanson’s An Anonymous Crown