I pick a small brown leaf off the tile floor, brought inside on the bottom of a shoe. A brown onion skin lies outside on the patio stone like a dead leaf, except that it's an onion skin. Important symbols, these: dead leaves and onion skins.
The pandemic and politics are wearing on me. I don't want to talk about them anymore, except, of course, that there is nothing else to talk about.
A friend who suffers from depression posted about how people who didn't understand depression before now understand depression. There was a sense of vindication in the post that depressed me.
The grocery store was almost completely out of chicken. The shelves were bare except for a couple packages of boneless skinless chicken thighs. Excuse me, I asked the guy behind the meat counter, are you out of chicken? Yeah, sorry, he said. No problem, thanks, I responded. Were chicken breasts the new toilet paper?, I wondered, grateful that I was at least secure in my TP supply (for now, anyway), and bought the thighs.
Someone I met once a long time ago is dying of cancer. We only hung out the one time, but I care about him and want him to live. He is a one-eyed black man with bowel cancer living in America; his life has not been easy. The prognosis is not good, though, and I worry that one day his facebook page will be the page of a dead man.
Speaking of death, elderly parents and grandparents in retirement homes are dropping like the tiny flies that infested the plant I bought at the hardware store, which is now relegated to the garage in the hope that the cold will kill the hardy little bastards. Sadly, retirement home residents are not as resilient as those tiny flies.
Covid-January is a goddamn drag.
