My optimism started to feel like an albatross yesterday. My head was too heavy for my neck muscles. Do I have it? The virus? Blood shoots up my body. I feel flushed. No, no. You’re just exhausted from giving out all the optimism.

I have this strange need to make others happy in times of crisis. It’s weirdly self-serving. I need everyone to be okay. Because, if they are not okay, how long can I hold out? I don’t want to be the last one to admit we are all not okay. I don’t want to arrive late to the 7 Stages of Grief the way I always arrived late to the multiplication tables in fourth grade. Everyone is on 9-times-9. I’m over here on multiples of 3. They have already learned all the things. They have already feared and screamed and vented and cried and calmed down. I’m just ramping up now?

“No,” I think. “I can fix this. Everything is flooded? Ok. Where are the rain boots and the flashlights and the buckets for filling the bathtub? Connect. Organize. Don’t buy chicken. It goes off too quickly. Buy pork and red wine and trash bags and Clorox. Let’s get to work. Let’s do something. Something. Anything.

People lost their jobs? Food. Start baking. Learn to grow and to knead and to proof and to till. Do something. Something. Anything.

Find your way back from the thoughts that creep in, arguing about how long you can remain optimistic. Avoid the news. It’s tempting; like a cliff edge. Ok, just one article a day. Oh, whoops, no, not that article. I scan the headlines, looking for a happier one. Something to feed my optimism tank. There isn’t anything this week.

I’ve been a long-time fundraiser at this point. There is a sense of ground under my feet directly following a catastrophe. I have spreadsheets and email addresses. I know a surprising amount of wealthy people, and I lean on them; their graciousness and charity is incredible. It stems from their understanding of how sometimes, you just are born fucking lucky. I need that expletive there. Fucking lucky.

“We aren’t in Yemen.” It’s something my boyfriend and I say to each other. At least four times a week.

“I’ve had the worst week ever.”

“Are you in Yemen?” (Cue sheepish “No.”)

“I didn’t hear you. Are you in Yemen? Are you in Syria? South Sudan?”

“Nope!”

“Then we are okay! Right?”

“Right!”

“Good. Now, tell me something awesome that happened.”

It fuels that gratefulness, these little repeated mantras we hold dear as a unit. We remember to remind each other to be so thankful that we were both just born fucking lucky.

But now this thing has arrived, brilliant in its microscopic power to shut us all down. To separate even us. Chris is in Manila. I’m in New Orleans. And even though I’ve been in a long distance relationship as long as I’ve been a fundraiser, I have never had to contend with an absence of flights. I’ve never had to battle with locked borders and sealed off nations. We’ve never gone more than two months without seeing each other. This thing before us yawns, and I see rows and rows of horrible teeth, comprised of hours and days and minutes and seconds.

This microscopic fucking thing … (Sorry mom. I’m in a mood.)

It’s got us all by the throat. By the lungs, quite literally.

Yemen to Yonkers to Grand Rapids to Ghana. I can’t fix this. The only thing I can do is stay away, and that’s the worst thing for someone like me; a person who naturally gathers people.

I like groups. I like bringing people to a party. My closest friends will adamantly tell you that I’m equally famous for slipping away first. The drinkers call this “An Irish Goodbye.”

I love an Irish Goodbye.

I love getting five or 10 or 20 people into a bar, reveling with them, introducing and buying rounds, and then, I love backing away. I like watching people chat on barstools. I love noticing the way a woman crosses her legs towards one of my male friends. I want to wink at him, but that’s too obvious. That’s practically obscene. I text, “She’s so into you,” as I slip out on a party I organized, created, and threw.

The East Village, so many nights, I recall the frigid, refreshing, snowy blast of dipping into dark streets. New York City is the best place on Earth for an Irish Goodbye. The thrum of conversation, ever present in the night air, and the way the neon puddles on the pavement in the softest shade of red imaginable. The way you can slip into some quieter dive bar on Avenue A for one last nightcap, knowing your friends are wondering where you got off to. I would get a text, smirk and silence my phone.

I always need that moment. That quiet with strangers to regroup. To refresh the serotonin I just splashed out like so much whiskey. I learned this long ago. I’ve got optimism for days, but it needs to be replenished, in quieter moments, alone with strangers.

Today in New York City, the traffic is gone, but the scream of ambulance sirens is apparently deafening. The switchboard for 9-1-1 got more calls today than they did on September 11th. A city that never sleeps, never stops moving, is alone, on twisted, damp sheets, feverish and terrified. And my heart cracks open reading the article I should not have clicked. And my little, tiny droplet of remaining optimism spills all over the keyboard and disappears.

There’s way too much quiet here in the French Quarter. Too, too much quiet. The birds scream from the trees, asking where we’ve all gone. One car passes per hour. Amazon hurls my packages over the spikes on the top of my gate. The brown boxes crash into my boxwoods. They are wise, these delivery people.

Throw it and run.

Separate and stay there.

This is the hardest disaster I’ve ever faced. September 12th was brutal. Hurricane Floyd burned my home––my sketches, my photos, my laptop, my favorite jeans. Katrina was a whore from Hell. I sat on a barstool with my arm around a friend as she took in the news that her uncle had drowned in the streets of New Orleans. Then, there was Sandy.

It’s so different this time.

It’s a sunny, stark day outside now, but I cannot bring myself to go out there. The sunlight somehow makes it worse. It looks fine, but it’s not. And I need to restore my reserves of optimism, but I just don’t know how. The empty French Quarter breaks my heart each day. Even something so simple as an Irish Goodbye (or an Irish Coffee) is impossible now. You’d have to come together. And, we are not allowed.

Am I in Yemen? No. No, I’m not.

But my optimism now seems such an albatross.

And, perhaps, on this sunniest of Sundays, I’m just too tired to carry it.