This holiday weekend, it was impossible for me to find anything reality-based that could distract me. Shows I used to watch with Constance have been deleted from my queue; just seeing them there made me cry. I attempted to watch an old episode of a reality TV game show but when a contestant broke down in tears about a cancer scare, I found myself heckling the screen by yelling, “Oh get over it. You didn’t even have cancer; you just thought you might!” I wasn’t exactly demonstrating the compassion of a saint.
With nonfiction barren of anyone whose life is even remotely as pathetic as mine, I turned to fiction. I discovered that in the post-Constance world, I can only tolerate significantly darker shows. Instead of self and home improvement, I’m watching things like the Ozarks, The Fall, and Top of the Lake. They don’t exactly depict the utopian paradises of family sitcoms. I suppose they now seem more realistic to me.
A woman at my hotel has a door that doesn’t exactly close all the way. It’s open about an inch. When I alerted her to it and asked if she’d called to alert service she said she “wasn’t worried about it.” What bewildering hopefulness. At first, I thought, “Wow, I wouldn’t be comfortable with my door open all night,” and then I wondered, “Unless she’s the dangerous person that strangers should be afraid of.”
