Author's Foreword: This is as close to an autobiographical episode as I'll ever write. I did indeed experience divorce during covid and there were things going on as this happened that I have wanted to get out of my head. The focus here is really more on the weird things of everyday living through that period as well as the emotions from getting back out in the world.
I suppose there are two important things to keep in mind, now that I've shared: first, believe that everything included in this story happened exactly as I've written it here, and second, realize that not one thing in this story is true in any fashion. It's fantasy. It's a fiction imagined while I lived through these two events -- both of which have certainly left a mark on me. This story is an amalgamation of many people, places, events, and feelings directly or peripherally in my life's journey during the two-plus years of the pandemic.
The first draft of this story was a patchwork of ill-fitting sections written in haphazard order with disparate tones and poorly placed rants. Since this was the longest story I'd written to date, I knew the editing was going to be an absolute nightmare. My editor for this, lonewolf68alpha, didn't complain though. They were an excellent partner in shaping this monstrosity into a coherent story and stamping out a ton of continuity and grammatical errors. Additionally, their ideas, comments, and edits brought balance and consistency that I could have never managed in a month of Sundays.
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After a year of living under the specter of COVID-19 and the fear of catching it lurking in every human interaction spaced fewer than six feet away, something inside me broke. I had to get away. Away from the innumerable Zoom calls. Away from the lack of meaningful human interaction. And away from the loneliness of working from home in a house without life.
Prior to the pandemic, I had been married. Not happily married, but still married. My then-wife served me divorce papers and we were about to mediate a settlement when we first heard of SARS-CoV-2. Life under COVID had begun and I agreed to move out of the house until the divorce was finalized.
I moved into the city to be closer to the office. Of course, in hindsight, this turned out to be a silly decision as the downtown offices all closed within a few weeks of my decision, but I didn't know it when I moved out. So, I found myself with a three-month lease in a high-rise apartment. The tenants of which all seemed to be twenty years younger than me, which wasn't that hard to tell, even masked up.
What made living there difficult was that they
all
seemed to be having sex
all
the fucking time. The apartments on either side of me and across the hall had some horny mother fuckers going at it all the time and at all hours. I vowed to stay faithful until the divorce was finalized, but it was difficult not to be jealous as hell at everyone rutting like animals, especially when I hadn't gotten laid in over a year.
Even if I hadn't gone the celibate route willingly, the beginning of the lockdown was a period of paranoia -- no one was taking a chance on meeting new people. If you had a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, or whatever the first few months of the pandemic, you were set up. If you didn't have someone at that point, you just went without for a while.
I could hear my neighbors' conversations through the walls pretty clearly and one twenty-something girl on the other side of my bedroom wall was especially vocal during sex. I jerked off multiple times to her dirty talking and moans and I even came the same time as her on multiple occasions. People were pretty paranoid about being around strangers because of the pandemic so I never ended up close enough to any of my neighbors to really see them or make eye contact. I had no idea if they were physically attractive, but their sounds certainly affected me. I was an excruciatingly sexual being that, over the last several years of my marriage, had nearly no sexual activity to show for it despite an ever-increasing appetite.
But I had never considered getting a divorce or cheating on my wife. When you got married, it was supposed to be for better or worse, right? It didn't really matter if I was hypersexual and she wasn't. What mattered was that what we had built over twenty years was deeper and more meaningful than just physical needs and if that was the bad, there was more than enough good in other places. Until there wasn't. But my sexual appetites and needs still existed in raging fashion and without outlet.
Anyway, after three months of working from home in that environment, the wife and I had worked through mediation, agreed to the terms of the divorce, and had a final order from the judge to use ex- when we referred to the other. I took off my ring, put it in an envelope, and left my downtown apartment. Within a month, I had purchased a house and moved my portion of the old household in.
And so that's how I lived for the next six months. No wife and no kids. I didn't have a dog. I didn't have a cat. I didn't even have a goldfish. What I had was work and a need to not dwell on the fact that I had little else.
But at the twelve-month mark, I was more than a little itchy. It was a Wednesday morning and within 15 minutes of getting out of bed, I grabbed a duffle bag, threw a week's worth of clothes and my toiletry bag in it, jumped in my truck, and started driving northwest. I called my boss and told him I had a family emergency out of town and that I'd be back in Atlanta and on the clock in a week. I muted my emails and turned on the Do Not Disturb to limit the interruptions.
I drove until I almost ran out of gas. I filled up and kept going. By early afternoon, I was entering the outskirts of Nashville. I planned on grabbing lunch at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack and killing enough time until I could check in to a hotel. I figured that I'd have to take my food to go and eat in the truck, but when I lucked out and grabbed one of the few available tables, I was able to take my time enjoying hot tenders, greens, fries, and sweet tea. Being away from my routine and at least in the vicinity of other adults and able to enjoy a great lunch put a charge in me.
I headed downtown and checked into the Hilton. I wanted a nice room with a great bed and knew I had plenty enough points banked to cover it. I might not have done a lot of traveling since the covid outbreak, but I had done more than my fair share in the twenty years prior. I knew enough about the area to not have to ask around on what there was to see and do. After I put my stuff in the room, I walked to Centennial Park which was a haul, but I wanted to work off the unhealthy lunch. The April weather was cool but pleasant. I just enjoyed sitting on the grass and people-watching for a few hours and I could do it without the restrictions of wearing a mask for most of the time.
As the sun disappeared from the sky, I made my way back downtown so I could wander from honkytonk to honkytonk on Broadway until I was honkeytonked out and well-lubricated. Around midnight, I made my way back to the hotel, took a long, super-hot shower, and fell asleep probably 15 seconds after turning on the TV to see what I had missed in the real world during the day.
I was up at 6:30 am as usual, though a little worse for the wear. I wet my hair to tame the rather scary bedhead I had going, brushed my teeth, and packed up my bag. I checked my phone and scanned through the scores of emails and a handful of missed calls. Not seeing anything important, I checked out, stowed my bag in the truck, and walked to Pancake Pantry for breakfast. It was too busy for the restricted seating, so I grabbed my food to go and ate off my tailgate under a cloudy sky.
When I got underway, I headed west and got gas when I needed gas. A little later, I stopped to go to the bathroom and grab something to drink. By 11:00 am, I was in the city limits of Memphis and figured I'd do another day similar to the previous, though I needed some help from the Internet to figure out what to do and where to go this time. The reason was simple enough: I didn't know Memphis nearly as well.
Continuing to stay with burning my Hilton points, I checked into the downtown DoubleTree. The room wasn't ready so I left my bag with the bellman and talked to the concierge about my day in town. After a few minutes of discussion, I decided on a day of music, museums, and gardens. Those sounded like the best mix of fun and manageable through social distancing. There was no way in hell I was going to try to visit Graceland all masked up and six feet apart. That would wait until after the threat of covid has passed or never in my life, but certainly not today.
My first stop was the Stax Museum. My parents had a Booker T and the MG's album that I had worn out as a kid, so of course, that was going to be my first stop. It was walkable, but I was planning too much to fit in under foot power alone. After an hour there, I called another Uber to save some walking time. After lunch, near the University of Memphis campus, I strolled to and around the Botanic Gardens for an hour or so until I called my final rideshare of the day to get me back downtown. I had her drop me off at the Blues Hall of Fame. It was about 3:30 pm after I finished and I walked up to Beale Street to do the Memphis Music Hall of Fame and the Rock 'n' Soul Museum, but since they both closed at 5:00 pm, I couldn't do both. I finished the Rock 'n' Soul Museum just before they closed up and was pretty worn out from the day.
I headed back to the hotel so I could shower before heading back down Beale Street for another evening of local cuisine and music, though much different than the Nashville scene and much more in line with my music tastes. I didn't make it as long into the evening, though, and crashed before 11:00 pm and had the soundest sleep I'd been able to manage in months.
Unfortunately for me and what could have been a wonderful extended sleeping-in period, I forgot to pull the curtains the night before. At 7:04 am, the sun announced its presence through a northeast-facing window with the visual equivalent of "Rise and shine, sleepy head!" I didn't bother to fight it. I just threw on some comfortable clothes, brushed my teeth, packed up, checked out, and started driving west. Once I was out of town, I stopped for gas and while waiting for the tank to fill, I looked at my destination options: Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston, or New Orleans.
Ugh, is that it?
Then I saw it.
Hot Springs, Arkansas.
That was it. That was my next stop. I knew it in my bones, though I couldn't provide any reason to feel that way. The pump clicked, breaking me out of my reverie and signaling the end of the refilling cycle. Back in the truck and on the road again, I blasted through Little Rock just after 9:30 am and kept on until I hit Hot Springs mid-morning.
