Canary in the Coal Mine

Kitty, I didn't even tell you about some of the worst parts.  Lola was sick again, a week before the virus hit.  The diarrhea, it was a slower onset this time, but when the vomiting happened, it was intense.  I could hear her stomach gurgling and knew what happened in September was happening again.  And, it was raining.  Alec and took her to the emergency vet in the rain; he sat in the backseat with her and I drove without windshield wipers all the way there, at the end of rush hour.  They insisted upon keeping her overnight and I didn't argue.  The blood had happened again.  When Lola is not well, I am not well.  I stop functioning in anyway, shape or form.  I stared at my phone all day of the 3rd and was relieved when they let us pick her up. I piled my stuff on my desk and waited until 3:00, called in sick to the Housing Authority and went to get my dog.  The only reason I didn't call in sick to regular work was because I had already requested a personal day on March 16th, for her birthday.  I was sick already and if we could just make it through this, she and I would have a long weekend together, for her birthday.  We would all feel better.  We got her, along with bags full of medicine.  Her arm was shaved again, from IVs.

In February, Alec and I had had prepared for the virus, a little.  I bought five pounds of basmati rice and ten pounds of dried beans.  A couple of those giant, two liter bottles of wine.  Some extra toilet paper.  I ordered an additional bag of dog food.  I really thought if this thing really happened, they would tell all of us that we literally couldn't leave the house for two weeks.  QUARANTINE.  And Lola, Alec and I would hunker down and play board games, only to emerge two weeks later to normality.  I feel like an idiot for thinking that now.

The school dreams started immediately.  My selective mute appeared the first night, but she was talking.  A lot.  And she was really fat and had makeup smeared all over her face, though she is only six.  The second meanest teacher at the school yelled at me one night and slammed her classroom door in my face while we argued about interpreters.  I sat up, feeling sweaty, though Alec and I had most of the windows in the house open and it was chilly.  Lola laid between us, her face burrowed against my leg.  Steve was in the Conservatory, her belly large and resting on a twig, looking out from the large bay window that overlooks the street.

When they sent us home on March 13th, I sheltered in place.  I thought I invented the term, until I heard it used on the news.  They use it for shootings, and I work in a school.  I only went out to the grocery store and even limited those trips.  And Petco twice, for crickets for Steve.  Okay, I bought beer from the gas station.  I went to the dog bakery on March 16th, Lola's birthday.  I know that is questionable, but I guess I didn't get it yet.  I haven't been within six feet of another person except Alec for two weeks.  I was surprised when people started talking about shelter in place orders in Atlanta or the surrounding counties.  Wasn't that what we were already doing?  When I got sent home from work, I went home.  Except for the dog bakery.

We've been doing a lot of Zoom faculty meetings.  I was stunned when my former roommate - classroom-mate, appeared on the screen when she logged in, in a hospital gown with an oxygen thing in her nose.  I knew she was sick, I knew she had a pneumonia and sickle cell, I knew she was hospitalized.  I didn't expect to see her face, ghostly and haunting from inside the death zone, isolated from her husband and one year old child.  I wanted to scream.

I watched the Senate arguments about the bailout-stimulous-whatever the fuck you want to call it and got pissed.  God forbid someone gets a few hundred dollars more than they already make.  What the fuck do they thing we are going to do with it?  Go to Paris?  Paris is closed, bitches.

I wake up now at 4am, instead of 3am, when my mind goes wild.  I lay in the bed with the breeze coming in and Lola pressed against me.  Sometimes Alec is there, sometimes he has moved to the couch because both of us have thrashed around too much. The owls went wild again the other night while Lola and I laid and listened. I hear the sirens, the ambulance sirens that have always haunted me in the night, on their Grady route, and I question if it's the slow sound of a person already dead or the wild siren of a person that might survive.
And, I don't know if the sirens are real or not.