The days bleed into one another and before I know it it’s been a month, a month of the same day. Each one has its own qualities, of course. The weather shifts almost as constantly as my moods, but there remains an unshakeable sense of sameness to everything. I cook the same cheap and easy depression meals, I walk the same streets, I take my biweekly trip to the grocery store. On the forty-second day I start sleeping with my head on the other end of the bed just to experience something new. 

I allow myself pleasure; I self-soothe with carbs, I eat as much ice cream as I want. I take lavender Epsom salt baths in the middle of the day. I order two new vibrators online. I eat oatmeal with peanut butter bananas and melted chocolate chips for dinner even though I have a drawer full of fresh vegetables. It’s quarantimes, why the fuck not? It tastes like summers in Maine growing up, when we’d roast bananas stuffed with pieces of a Hershey bar over the campfire. My body grows softer, and stronger at the same time. 

I fall in love with one tree outside my window, and then a second. We form a polyamorous triad. I create a garden on my fire escape; I wait for nearly an hour in a line three blocks long to purchase vegetable starts. I ride home with plants spilling out of my bike basket and slung from my handlebars; I think that if I saw myself ride by, I’d want to draw me. Be your own muse in these trying times, I guess. 

I receive a tornado warning alert on my phone — just what we all need right now! It storms for days, or weeks. I’m not sure. All I know is the sun eventually comes back out, and I’m relieved to find my kale shoots have survived the wind. 

I feel everything deeply, I take it all personally. My ego will not chill. I soak in the bath til my fingers and toes shrivel and prune. I cry out the entirety of the water content in my body until I feel like a dried out sea sponge. I grieve all of the flowers I will never see bloom. I grieve the loss of physical intimacy, platonic and romantic. I miss my routines, I miss getting a matcha from Laura every Saturday morning, I miss stopping to talk to Newton on the way to the train. I even miss my commute. But I’m practicing gratitude. I recognize all of my privileges. I remain grateful for the flowers I do see bloom, and the birds and the wind and this new feeling of calm amongst panic.  

I feel like a child again, staring out the window for hours, noticing the way rain droplets move in the beam of a streetlight, how the trees sway and shiver in the dark like witches around a fire. On the rare occasion I venture out, I see everything differently; it all feels new, brighter. I take pleasure in the folds of a tulip, I notice, for the first time, small architectural details on buildings I’ve walked past hundreds of times. 

I’m alone but I’m not lonely. I luxuriate in my own company. I burst with creativity. Growing up, making art was how I coped with feeling isolated, so in a way, it's comforting and familiar. Thinking about when things will change feels suffocating, so I don’t plan. I let go of imagining an end, and I arrive somewhere resembling acceptance. 

Carly Larsson is the second place winner for Personal Essay in the Ninth Annual Humanities and Sciences Writing Contest. Carly is an illustrator/designer/writer working between Brooklyn NY and Portland OR. She holds a BFA in Illustration & Communications Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY and an MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown across the US and internationally, published in the Washington Post, featured by the Association of Illustrators, and shortlisted for the Moleskine Reportager Award and the Communication Arts Annual Illustration Award. Lately she’s most interested in projects including reportage, live drawing, visual essays, surface + pattern design, food, fashion + beauty and hand drawn animation