Small joys edge us toward hysteria, giggling with the friends in our building with whom we’re sheltering, tripping along the sidewalk to Target with masks on, stumbling home as if drunk with needful things—athletic socks, Sharpies, a box of ice cream sandwiches. Hilarity around a jigsaw puzzle in the high night of the third floor; silent now, everyone asleep except me and my glass of Bowmore and the books I pet more than read, for companionship and a link to normalcy, literacy, worlds in abeyance or gone. The semester slouches toward its end, the world too, always beginning. Real life.