Daria Quarantined
Life has a funny way of kicking you in the teeth.
Here she was at 33, living in New York as a successful comedy writer, having done The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, then when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert left she had moved on to SNL and recently gotten a job at Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.
She was still able to work, via Skype, which was good since ironically enough without some human contact Daria suspected she'd have gone stark raving mad.
She had gotten in touch with Jane, like her trapped in her apartment due to the lockdown, though Jane was living with her current boyfriend Luke and her two cats.
She had been planning to get a new cat in recent weeks, having felt more up to the notion now that a year had past and her mourning for her last cat was done.
That wasn't possible at the moment, getting to an animal shelter was near impossible with the restrictions, she barely had time to get to the grocery store for the meager supplies now on offer.
Her mother had called, they had been on a cruise in January that thankfully had not been infected. Though Daria could hear her father freaking out about possibly being infected (he wasn't).
Daria had then called Quinn to check on her, Quinn had gone into lockdown in her mansion in the Crewe Neck with her children, Daria wasn't sure if Quinn's current boyfriend was there with them or not, dealing with the triplets was exhausting after a few minutes.
"Still don't know where sis gets the energy from." Daria said to herself, breaking the silence of the apartment.
She glanced at the pile of unread books still available to be read, and those were just the physical books, she had plenty more on her Kindle. She had watched some Netflix and Hulu but the shows seemed to blend together after a while.
In the occupied apartment adjacent to hers was Cheryl Armstrong, a retired 70 year old woman whom she had met before but now was hiding away like her, then again Daria knew that it was for good reason.
If Cheryl caught the virus, at her age and with her health issues she was all but guaranteed to die.
So no socialization there.
Things could be worse, Daria knew that intellectually, but emotionally...
"Now here's irony, I spent much of my teen years wishing for something just like this so I could be alone. Now that it's happened, I wish that it didn't."
She had gotten bored enough to reactive her Facebook and check up on people from the past, her last boyfriend had apparently broken up with his latest girlfriend, a few people from Lawndale were posting memes and news stories about the outbreak, some of which was blatant fake news or politically slanted beyond belief.
"At least Brittany got Kevin to understand the concept of spellcheck." Daria mused aloud.
She looked at Twitter, mostly the same expect the bots were even more obvious.
Sick of the silence Daria turned on Pandora on her phone, she wished she had gotten a new smartphone before all of this had happened.
An alt rock station began playing the best of the 90's, it was The Cranberries 'Zombie' that was her new background noise.
Daria then grabbed a notebook and began to jot down some ideas, physical writing sometimes helped the ideas flow better than typing on her laptop or tablet.
Maybe it would form a new short story, or maybe wind up in John Oliver's monologue, or it might wind up on the pile of unused material.
Or maybe the madness of forced isolation would consume her completely.
"I need a drink." Daria muttered to herself, even while not moving to the liquor cabinet, her dwindling supplies needed to be rationed out until she got to the grocery store again.
It was the only thing to do during a government lockdown, avoid boredom, ration your supplies, and think about everything you could hypothetically buy when let out.
FIN