Distancing in the Dark

The lights went out last night. Right in the middle of an episode of Breaking Bad, my television screen went dark. Shame on me for becoming a Netflix junkie so late in the game, but I was despondent. Well, maybe just annoyed, but the pandemic tends to magnify. 

A push alert had warned me of flooding, but nobody had warned me my evening of binge watching, the thing I look forward to all day, would be interrupted. On a day I had decided to go wine-free, just to see if it was still possible. (It was. Barely.)

Zoom cocktail hours, walks to Whole Foods and Target and, yesterday, the somewhat guilty cheat of Sunday dinner in person with my kids (they have a large table) notwithstanding, the isolation has seemed overwhelming. Darkness didn't help. I heard commotion in the hallway and poked my head out, surprised to see everybody else had done the same thing. It was oddly tentative, the head poking, nobody daring to venture too much into the communal space. Some even wore masks, determined to ward off an unlikely onslaught of stray viral droplets. Though back-up generators kept the hallway lit, we all withdrew quickly into our own darkness, comforted to know we were at least, still, in the same boat. 

As power outages go, it really wasn't so bad. There's no heat wave, as there usually is when the power grid goes haywire, and the city lights outside helped. I rustled up every candle I could find, filling my small apartment with dancing shadows and a somewhat nauseating mix of scents, including something called "karma." I've discovered that karma is better felt than smelled. 

I crawled into bed with my phone and my Kindle, hoping the batteries would outlast the blackout. Feeling, for some reason, as if my suffering had just increased tenfold. A pandemic topped by darkness and no Netflix. And no wine. I wondered how much more I could bear. A lot, if what others are going through is any indication. 

The lights came on within 90 minutes, but I stayed in bed. I face-timed with my son, and talked about the world with him for a while. Politics, pandemics. As always, he gave me a bit of a history lesson, and I went to sleep, still discouraged about the state of things, still worried about all the unknowns, but content that I had seen all my kids that day, one way or another, and they are all fine, they had all made me laugh, and, at the end of the day, I knew more than I had when I woke that morning. 

This morning, I might know more than I knew yesterday, but still, the unknowns loom large. Tonight, though, there will be wine. And Netflix.