I found that non-stop stand-up comedy is therapeutic to the point of necessity.

I did pretty nothing except one thing: I cooked in the kitchen again. I can meet my basic needs again. Now, I’m trying to go to bed at a decent hour so I can try to stop fearing sleeping at night.

And to accomplish this task:

I am going to start offering astrology services again in the near future. Why? I need the cheddar. I need the normalcy. I also need to find ways to connect with people while being isolated. I need to fill up the time I have on evenings and weekends.

How do I feel? I don’t know. I don’t want to feel anything. A cycle of sadness, regret, annoyance, curiosity, wistfulness, and anxiety, all being sucked down into a hole in me that I haven’t found the bottom of yet.

This apartment is a hole. It’s the place of loss.

And if I dissociate, I think I am in a one-performer play about a woman who suddenly loses her boyfriend/fiancé/partner/husband during an epidemic and is quarantined in the apartment he died in, isolated from everyone. Because that seems like dark comedy to me.

There will be other characters. There was that time I talked to a neighbor from ten feet away. And a few delivery people who also had to delivery food like it was a drug trade between two untrusting parties. And the neighbors I had to explain why I had to stand far away and not take the elevator with them. Maybe the rat who ran out from the dumpster when I was taking out the garbage has something to say.

I was texting with one of my sisters-in-law this evening talking about Rick and his brothers, because any woman who has been married to one of these men knows how they are. I thought I was getting a hazing when I’d casually mention something at a holiday that could engender discussion, and then I have two or three of them because I accidentally stumbled into one of their areas of expertise? And the brothers would band together against even their own wives, because they apparently had some sort of genetic predisposition to argue about shit that doesn’t matter just to be right.

Or maybe they all have a genetic predisposition to stubbornness, and it wasn’t just my own who was like that.

My own is also the first brother to die. I’m not sure how his siblings feel. I should ask them. It’s hard to remember that I’m not the only one who lost him. There’s others. I just can’t see them.

I wish there was a funeral. I wish there was a gathering, a formal farewell, and I don’t even like these kinds of rituals but now I need one.

But moreover, I wish he could have been here. I wish I could have made him laugh one last time.