day drinking

A good friend hit me up on FaceTime yesterday evening. It was dark and I could barely see her. She had escaped to her porch for a moment away from her spouse and teenager. “I started drinking at 2 p.m.,” she announced. She took a breath to steady herself, lowered her voice, and leaned in so close that all I could see were her nose and mouth. “Can I kill them?” she breathed. “Please tell me I can kill them.”

Of course she would never kill them. This is a woman who would stand in front of a train for the people she loves. Hell, she shops for groceries in a coronavirus infected world for the people she loves; that’s the definition of a selfless caregiver right now.

But her moment of desperation got me out of my own head for a moment. I have had dark moods where I have felt really alone in all of this. I miss humans. I don’t know when I might see The Stallion again, or be able to give my dearest friends a hug. I even miss the coffee shop guy. My housekeeper. Colleagues.

But I’m actually pretty good with my own company. I rarely argue with myself, I’m a decent cook, I’m not bad at keeping things tidy, and, if I eat the last cookie I don’t leave the bag sitting there, empty, in the cupboard for the next person to get their hopes up only to find there are no treats left. No. I throw the bag away like a civilized person.

But I digress.

The point is that even the people we love the most can wear on us. This is an incredibly stressful time, with a vast uncertainty ahead. What’s the idiom? The only thing certain is death and taxes? We can’t even count on that right now. The federal income tax filing deadline has been pushed to July 15. In a once-in-a-century crisis, it’s hard to know anything.

Unless you’re my mom.

“You know who are going to come out like bandits in all of this?” she asked me today, looking over her glasses into the phone, while her knitting needles clicked together out of frame. “Divorce lawyers.”