APRIL 15, 2020
I yelled at my husband on the street today. A stranger stopped and asked us for directions. I kept walking. Matthew, my husband, paused to help, standing less than six feet from the man. “Oh my God, stand back!” I shouted. I grabbed Matthew by the arm, pulled him away, and suggested to the stranger that if he was lost, he could use his smartphone.
When I apologized to Matthew at home, I explained that everything is stressing me out about Toronto these days: opening the door to our condo lobby, touching the buttons on the elevator, passing people in the halls. The virus could be anywhere. It’s a conversation we have had before, like after I called Matthew “reckless” for picking a stray nickel up off the sidewalk. “Try to relax,” he told me. I said, “It’s hard.” I feel nervous every time we go out, and the scores of shuttered storefronts depress me. “I want to leave,” I said, referring to our vague plans of escaping to our cabin in the Laurentians. “We can’t,” he replied. A simple truth. Quebec has closed its border to Ontario. Fine. I will continue distracting myself the same way everyone is: eating too many carbs, watching too much Netflix.
MAY 17, 2020
I’m sitting in the car with countless cans of soup jangling in boxes on the backseat. The noise is only buffered slightly by the bags of powdered milk and sacks of flour packed on and around the cans. Quebec just reopened its border, clearing the police checkpoints that have been in place for
