Wake Up Call

I woke up at about 3:30 this morning. It was my friend Alycia calling. She had just rear-ended a parked car. The police had already come to deliver their report and left. This was bad news for more than the obvious reason that her car no longer worked. She had been living in her car after having left the halfway house she had been living at for a year. Before that, she had been living with me because she had no place to go after she got out of jail. Long story short, she was convicted of the crime of being mentally ill. Since she was taking medication this time, I had agreed to help her. When she was living with me, she was anxious and depressed all the time, which was a burden to deal with. After she moved to the other place, she changed. She became a completely healthy person. She was even joyous, a lot of fun to be around. Lately, she had been taking steps to improve her life. She had passed a mortgage license exam. She was applying for jobs. This picture of her and me was from her birthday last month. But then, unexpectedly, she turned to the dark side again and left the halfway house. This issue, according to her, was a dispute with the owner about her medication. With the pandemic becoming worse, the was the perfectly wrong time for her to be living in her car. I've heard that there is a correlation between pandemic infections and psychosis, but the true cause may never be known.

I kept falling asleep while she was talking to me. I couldn't let her stay with me due to the governor's call for social distancing. I told her it's too late for me to help her and we ended the call.

After lunch, she called me again. She wanted me to help her get cash because her debit card was no longer giving her cash from ATM's. Her car was parked six miles away in a neighborhood in Calabasas. She told me to call her when I was almost there because she would be getting something to eat and wanted time to walk back to her car. I told Siri to call her and text her warnings when I was was on my way, but she didn't answer. I parked my car up the street from her car. She wasn't in it. The front end was totaled. I took a picture of it and went back to my car. After I texted the picture to her sister, Alycia called me. She didn't even know that I had tried to call her. I drove to the Denny's where she was waiting for me in front of the restaurant, not inside, since it was closed, like most other businesses these days. We didn't hug. That's a bad idea now. I was wearing the mask and gloves I wear when I go shopping. She sent me some money online and I gave her the same amount in cash. She left to get something to eat and I said I'd see her later. I felt empty when I walked back to my car.

People are dying from the coronavirus. It has killed about 2,400 Americans so far as of this writing, and about 34,000 worldwide. As terrible as that as, we have to remember that mental illness is also a disease that destroys lives.