Ah Monday. Monday after a holiday break. It’s truly painful. Reminding myself to sit and make nine hours pass is just excruciating.
“You sit here, in this place that you hate, doing crap that you don’t like for nine hours. Don’t move until 4:30pm. Starting the clock… Now.”
No one on my team asked how my holiday went. I mean it was an absolute shit show and I had no intention of hiding that, but someone had to ask first. I don’t work with the kinda team that notices hair dye or asks how your weekend was. I work with a person who hates my guts and another who’s a squirrely micromanager. But DeBitch hates everyones guts so apparently that makes it okay. Yes, I’ve complained about her multiple times. Multiple people have.
Anyway, finally after lunch, a guy from another lab comes over to snipe some candy from the goody bowl. He asks the whole room how their break went and I took the opportunity to unload. DeBitch didn’t even both to offer a glance or condolences because she hates me. Who cares?
And the news just states the numbers. Over 350,000 dead in the US from Covid-19. Three hundred and fifty thousand people. Moms in that number. Just one in a massive sea of other faceless number ones. It’s almost insulting. I want to take insult. You mean 350,000 deaths PLUS MY MOM. She wasn’t a fucking number. But to most that’s all it boils down to. A massive pile of lives lost: people they loved, deeds they did, plans they had — they’re just a statistic to us. They don’t even care to keep track of the hundreds, tens or singles. In fact, we’re not even tracking thousands anymore. Just a single partial digit in an unfathomable number. A god damned fraction of a single digit. In a growing number that doesn’t even register much to anyone anymore.
I called my brothers wife on the way to work today. It was nice that she was expecting my call. She had asked me what time I usually go to work when we talked the other day. She asked me what time I’d be off too. I’ve talked to my brother and sister-in-law more this week than in the last two years, I’d wager.
My sisters don’t answer their phones or respond to text messages reliably. I wonder if we are destined to drift apart without our mother to hold the team together. Or is it just me drifting? My sisters currently live together and they’re chained to my brother for the sake of his children, our sweet nephews. I’d always complain about no one responding to my messages and mom always got mad and said “none of these people talk!” It’s true. But we all talked to mom. And mom kept us all up to date on the others. Now they don’t answer my texts.