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DAY 16: TOTAL CONFIRMED DEATHS 33,997 WORLDWIDE

It felt good to clean.

It was Sunday, and though the titles of the days of the week were now meaningless, she decided to stick to an imaginary schedule in order to keep grounded to reality. It was a thin string, like that of an orb spider, a silky thin but strong anchoring “bridge line”- her only connection to what used to be called “life.”

So she would pretend that this Sunday, like every Sunday, contained the last remaining moments of the weekend, so she would clean. Prepare the house for the week. Wash her clothes. Make her bed.

The latter was proving difficult. Each day she thought about making her bed. There had been articles written on how making one’s bed was the key to having a successful and focused day, but she just had never been a bed maker. She loved naps. And her cats were always snuggled up and nested in the bed anyway. Who would know? It’s not like she had people over regularly. And now… well… no one would see the inside of her abode, maybe for months to come.

Still, she pretended. The sheets and pillowcases were stuffed into the washing machine first, and then the quilt. She did more laundry after that, and realized that she went through far less clothes when she wasn’t working; she was sure each laundered pair of jeans had been worn at the minimum, two days in a row.

Hmm... on the bright side, she was saving money.

She swept, mopped, cooked and even cleaned the mess. Scrubbed the stove until it shone. Today had been a productive day, and she was ready for Monday.

But there would be no Monday morning traffic. No jokes about “having a case of the Mondays.” No one to purposely ignore at work as she pointed to her full coffee cup- everyone knew not to talk to her before she had at least one cup. She was that kind of un-morning person. No group of similarly unhappy teenagers looking up at her as she tried to remember what her class was doing that day.

Monday morning would come and go before she would even open her eyes. She had turned her alarm clock off over two weeks ago.

He looked at her raw and chafed hands- it felt good to have pretended to put in a hard day’s work. She was a good actress, a great one, really. In her mind she did an excellent curtsy to no one in particular, tucked herself into her fresh, clean bed, and tried not to dream about the mounds of bodies piling up in her own country.

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