The Bag o' Death

My wife has placed me in quarantine. This week I am battling a cold, and while she is perfectly willing to support the cause from afar, procuring war materiel--Puffs, antihistimines, aspirin from the grocery store--there is no way she is willing to join me on the front lines.

I understand and to some degree support her squeamishness. She works as a massage therapist, a hands-on, one-woman business that would quickly tank if her nose were dripping all over her clients on the massage table. I rely on her income as much as she does.

But it's been a lonely and comical week. When she enters the room she asks what I have touched, and promptly sprays the contaminated object--doorknob, countertop, drinking glass, cat--with Lysol. She waves cheerily at me as I drag my tired, stuffy head to my bachelor's bed each night. I carry my Puffs around with me as I move from room to room, along with a plastic sack full of used tissues she calls "The Bag o' Death."

Sneezing is discouraged, tolerated only if the sneeze is captured, successfully contained, and immediately disposed of in the BOD.

I like to think our enforced distance has brought us together. It has given us a common project, a goofy new child that we monitor constantly, a partnership of avoidance in which we both have a stake. It's an oversized ottoman in the living room around which we dance.

Slip ups are sweet. She buys a hot chocolate at Starbucks so delicious she impulsively gives me a sip. In my isolation I am never alone--I sneeze on the toilet and the door opens, a disembodied hand injects a disinfecting spritz of Lysol into the middle of the room, and quickly withdraws.