Day 6.

How many mornings have I woken up to the obnoxious gurgle of my alarm at 6:30 a.m. and wished fervently to awake leisurely, quietly, sans alarm? How many days have I wedged myself into a sardined subway car and longed to always work from home? How many Sunday evenings have I sat on my couch, enjoying frivolous entertainments wishing only to drift on a sea of content in socks and soft pants forever?

Be careful what you wish for, they say.

Here we are. New York City virtually locked down. Most major metropolitan areas veritable ghost towns, grocery stores ransacked, everyone with their very own mountain of toilet paper. The news resembles what you’d see in the first act of your average Roland Emmerich disaster film, everyone a bit breathless with the enormous weirdness of it all, the unthinkable ramifications that we are all trying to anticipate, looking for logic, asking unanswerable questions. But just like the characters in a splashy disaster movie, all anyone can do is get through it, as dictated by their circumstances.

Unlike the characters in splashy disaster movies, there will likely be no one moment or scene—a suspenseful, choreographed denouement of barely achieved, against-impossible-odds success—brought on by a scrappy team of charismatic heroes who sacrifice everything for the benefit of humankind, that resolves all of this, that we can all observe and say, “Whew! Thank goodness Bruce Willis/Dennis Quaid/John Cusak/Dwayne Johnson was here to save us all! Let’s clean this mess up and get back to normal!”

In this reality, we are all that scrappy team of heroes. And we don’t have to run from a tidal wave of sudden sea-level rise, hotwire nuclear bombs in the core of an asteroid speeding to earth, navigate a faltering C30 to the reorganized poles of the planet, fly a helicopter with our ex-wife copilot into ravaged San Francisco to rescue our last remaining child. Nope, all we have to do is sit our asses at home. Don’t go out unless you have to. Do not under any circumstances go to places that are crowded. And wash our fucking hands.

The bar for being a hero has fallen dramatically. We can all do this, no problem. Right?

As an introvert, I’ve been social distancing since before it was cool. Ask all my friends whom I’ve flaked on several times over the years simply because I could not bear the pleasant burden of an engaged conversation. I love bars and restaurants, but if they can be remotely described as “hot and new,” “crowded” or “busy,” I will always eschew. I was built for this moment. I am ready.

So far, anyway.

Since the Coronavirus started altering the world’s reality, I have been swinging wildly between feeling deeply paranoid and alarmist, and being completely blasé. I cannot seem to settle on a comfortable middle. One hour I’ll get in a little extra hand-washing and shrug and think, maybe it’s not all that bad. The next hour I’m on Amazon frantically trying to find a vendor who will deliver three 12-packs of toilet paper to my house sometime before April. These swings continue to this day, even as we all settle into this new normal. The equilibrium of concerned but prepared, cautious but pragmatic is hard to strike, but I feel like I’m slowly finding it. For today.

For today, it’s still fairly easy to focus on what to be grateful for in all this: my job that allows me to work remotely; our roomy apartment where there’s space for all of us; that our dog can’t catch it; that i can go to bed after midnight because it’s okay if I sleep past eight in the morning, now that my commute has gone from 40 minutes to four seconds; all the cooking I can do; that I can maybe even finish a knitting project, finally watch The Mandelorian and spend a lot (A LOT) of quality time with my two favorite creatures. I am lucky. I have security (for now). I have company. Too, too many people are not so fortunate.

It’s Day 6. I am curious as to what days ahead will bring, but equally anxious too. Think I may be implementing an early happy hour rule starting…

Now.