Dystopia in December

Earlier this year, I had wondered what it must have been like to live in one of those places where the first wave of the pandemic hit really hard. Although even then it had not been that far away, at least not personally, I had thought that it might be different to have this disaster happen right in front of me. While elsewhere the hospitals had been too full and the dead could not have been buried in time, around here such a situation had been avoided.

In summer I was yearning for someone to only sometimes meet me and take a walk with me, but most of my friends had been too worried to do so. They had always said that most people did not take the pandemic serious enough anymore, because disaster had never happened.

So, all I could do was having witching wine nights with Layla and think of better days.

Those have not come yet.

It only got worse.

When in October I had just started a new job and an official trip was discussed, there were news flashing up on my phone that stopped me from believing in any of these things to actually happen. We were just about to hit milestones like for the first time ever more than 10 000 infections in only one day.
We went anyway.

Now, a month later, there was another one of those milestones reached. We are actually experiencing the disaster that some of us have been so desperately been missing in summer.
For the first time there had been more than 1000 deaths in only one day, the cases were stil rising, and the hospitals were already expecting to reach their limit.

News like that had me spontaneously call in sick for work (zoom-meetings aren‘t real, I swear!), and after a long day in bed I had gotten so drunk that I had not been able to tell the chat windows for my really drunk messages apart anymore – and in the end, I had ordered enough pizzas for two more days at 4 AM.
So, this is what disaster feels like.

I doubt that it will be enough to make us turn off the human part deep inside of us long enough to preven anymore of it.

The part is weak and tired, and starved. The part that opens up the bottle of wine and whispers into it that it would rather die after giving in to weakness than live anymore days like this (but only into the bottle!).

„Right now, life is just spreading your legs and smiling a thank you for an awful lot of pain“, my witch says, leaning in the doorway and eating one of my dead grandmother‘s favorite chocolate bars. „And we don‘t know who or what will still be here afterwards.“

In the aftermath, this might look like the last few months of holding still, before things will get better, and living as a human being will be possible again. After all, the vaccinations are beginning.
But it feels different. It does not feel like the next milestone will come. Neither a dark one as in even more deaths, or a good one towards solving this.

Everything is just really dull, and really lonely, and driving me mad enough to believe that drinking too much wine and ordering pizzas as if I had company might just be the beginning.

„Knowing that you might fill the most dramatic and dark pages of the history books does not feel that cool, once your family died of the plague and you‘re about to burn alive, right?“, Layla giggled into the darkest December night that I had ever experienced.