Taking my life into my hands...

... which of course means, I just got back from the grocery store.

Yes, I wore a mask (and gloves); yes, I kept a good distance from everyone else; yes, I washed my hands thoroughly after unloading everything. The anxiety was still rather literally breath-taking.

(It doesn't help that Siderea managed, as usual, to land the perfect metaphor yesterday.)

As to "breath-taking": I realized, about a quarter of the way through the store, that I was rather close to hyper-ventilating. Which is almost perfectly counter-productive: maximizing the airflow through the mask is not the point. I had to pause for 20 seconds to return my breathing to normal.

I'm really not used to fear any more: quite frankly, the process of Jane's death left me much more likely to react with anger than obvious fear per se -- more "fight", less "flight". (No, this doesn't come up too often in real life, but occasionally my dreams remind me that there's still more broken glass in my head than I like to admit.)

But the ambient sense of "there are killers out there on the street who want nothing more than to break into the house and murder us" is kind of getting to me, especially over time. I'm going to have to spend some time getting my head straight there. Granted, the terror about going out amongst uncontrolled people is useful under the circumstances, and arguably somewhat rational, but I don't want to come out of this even more broken. (And fear rarely leads to good decision-making, in my experience.)

Anyway -- as to the store itself, I don't have anything to complain about. The Porter Square Star is actually managing better than I might have expected, not just with limiting the number of people inside, but in terms of their attempts at traffic management. They've taped down the floors to try to create a one-way traffic flow through the store, so people don't have to pass in the narrow aisles. It's at best partly successful (because people are idiots who can't be arsed to follow nice clear one-way signs), but I applaud the effort.

The actual stocks reveal a lot about the panic-buying. (And to be fair, the sensible prepping.) Fresh produce is mostly abundant and high-quality, arguably moreso than usual, whereas the soup section is thin (as it were) and you still can't find a roll of toilet paper for love or money.

Anyway: lots of groceries bought, so I don't have to go do that again for a little while. How are y'all doing with it?