My quarantine is over. I go to work every day in an office with hundreds of other people, all of us wearing masks, all of us getting our temperature taken before we can enter the building. I make the drive each morning and notice how every day there are more and more cars on the road, people walking around, workers waiting at bus stops. Life goes on, even if that life isn’t the same one we had been living before March.

But is my quarantine really over? I don’t go out to eat, not even to restaurants with outdoor seating. I go to the supermarket and I dash in and out of the aisles, touching just what I need to touch, holding my breath when other people come down the same aisle as me. I get in and out of the store as fast as possible and when I get home, I scrub my hands and put my clothes in the wash. I don’t go anywhere after that because one trip out of the house a day is all I can handle. And where would I go? No movies, no concerts, no gatherings. I won’t even go to the library. The idea of being in public practically suffocates me. And so I go nowhere but work and the small Italian supermarket by my house, the one where they have someone stationed by the carts to wipe them down as you return them.

I feel like Death has come for me, but has decided to just hover around me, making me feel its presence but not quite putting its bony hands on my shoulder quite yet. There’s a pall over everything, a funeral shroud that makes everything feel close and damp, like constant humidity laying low in my brain. I walk around in a fog, Death following me, breathing down my neck, making sure I know its there. I don’t…