1. You can’t remember when you last left the house.
2. Or brushed your hair.
3. Or showered.
4. The outside world has achieved mythological status.
5. Getting ready to do something as mundane as going to the grocery store now requires gear and sanitary supplies.
6. And has a new hint of danger.
7. Some days, just the gearing up is so exhausting that you give up and say, “Fuck it, I’ll go tomorrow.”
8. It’s anybody’s guess whether you will, in fact, go tomorrow.
9. Strangers getting into your personal space make you panic or feel stabby. Or both.
10. When you do manage to go to the grocery store, it takes three times as long, costs twice as much, and usually, someone ends up crying.
11. Getting home from the grocery store and realizing that you forgot to buy something important feels well-nigh catastrophic.
12. People demand to be fed at all hours of the day and night.
13. Wipes, a consumer product previously not even on your radar, are now as important as oxygen. And you use them with approximately the same frequency.
14. Sleep only comes in the least convenient increments possible: lots of it when there are other things you need to do, absolutely none of it when you’re tearing-your-hair-out tired.
15. All of a sudden, everyone you know has an opinion on how germs are transmitted, and all of them think you should live according to their version — regardless of your own opinion, the opinions of anyone else, or, you know, actual science.
16. There is no good reason to wear anything other than pajamas.
17. What does “having a life” really mean, anyway?
18. The walls of your home could really use a paint job. You know this because you keep finding yourself absently staring at them.
19. You snap at the least little thing.
20. You get tearily sentimental at the least little thing.
21. You catch yourself longing for life to go back to “normal,” even as the memories of it get hazier and hazier.
22. You know it’s true, but you’re not quite ready to admit it: Life will never be the same again.
Pandemic: 1-22
Newborn: 1-22