The days passed, each one almost identical to the last. Cristina and Christian worked on the deck, watched TV, and ordered in food. Cristina tried to keep up with her friends, but they all had struggles of their own. As the days passed, she found fewer and fewer reasons to contact her friends. She found herself slipping little-by-little into depression. She had called her pharmacy, trying to get her medication delivered to Christian's, but since she had just filled it before ending up in quarantine, they said she would need the doctor to send it over to them again in order to refill it. She had called her doctor's office and left several messages but had not received a call back. Eventually, she just stopped trying because, initially, she had been doing pretty well without her meds. She had even considered the fact that she might not need them anymore.

Her therapist was not doing in-person appointments and had not switched to telehealth visits yet, due to issues with her personal computer at home. Christian had not been attending telehealth therapy either.

Cristina had felt that they were both doing fairly well under the circumstances. That is until an update had come through her Facebook feed --- an update on Sean's relationship status. The post contained ten pictures of a smiling Sean with a heavily pregnant woman. The photo of just their hands displayed the woman's flashy diamond engagement ring, the very ring he had used to propose to her. The caption read, "The love of my life."

Cristina swallowed hard. She knew Sean had every right to move on with his life, but she couldn't help feeling like she should have been the woman in those pictures. He had said that SHE was the love of his life, and now, no pictures of her remained on his page. He had scrubbed his entire profile of any memory of her. She knew she should stop scrolling, but she couldn't seem to control her thumb.

"Oh, nice," she deadpanned when she saw an ultrasound picture with the caption, "It's a boy!"

"Why does everyone insist on announcing their kid's gender?" she groused. "I bet they were cheesy enough to do a gender reveal."

Cristina continued to scroll. "Ah, there it is," she said as her death scrolling brought her to a video of Sean and his new woman setting off blue pyrotechnics to announce that their baby did, in fact, have a penis. "Nice job, assholes!" she yelled at the phone. "You could have started a forest fire! Oh, and how about we don't get people together in the middle of a pandemic, dumbass?" she continued.

What began as anger, quickly devolved into sadness and self-pity. "I was supposed to be the mother of your children!" she sobbed at the phone, as if the inanimate object could somehow give her a reason for Sean's change of heart. "You said I was too much, too emotional, too needy," she accused the absent Sean. "But this bitch looks every bit as needy as me. In fact, she looks like a goddam narcissist!"

Christian knocked on her door. "Are you alright in there?" he asked through the closed door.

"Never been better!" Cristina answered back sarcastically. "My ex-fiancé got another girl pregnant and now he's splashing it all over the internet. So, that's fun."

"Okay," Christian replied, not knowing what else to say. "I ordered some jjajangmyeon. Do you want some?"

"It's 9:00 AM. Who eats black bean noodles at 9:00 AM?" Cristina complained.

"Hungry people," Christian responded flippantly.

"You go ahead," Cristina said. "I've lost my appetite anyway because men are pigs!" she declared.

"Okay," Christian replied, again lacking the words to respond to her charge. The day stretched on, and Cristina did not get up. Christian found himself pacing outside her door, like a dog who needs to be let outside. He was full of energy, and she was wilting more with each passing hour. He invited her to eat two more times that day, but she declined.

For her part, Cristina spent the rest of the day, scrolling through picture after picture of Sean and the woman who should have been her. She saw how mutual friends had commented positively on his posts. One woman, whom Cristina had counted equally her friend as Sean's, had commented, "I'm so happy for you, Sean. You deserve it! You've been through a lot. I'm so glad to see you with a woman who makes you happy!"

"With a woman who makes him happy?!" Cristina cried. "That's rich! So, I guess I'm the bitch who ruined his life, and now everyone is feeling sorry for all I put him through! Classic!" she groused. "I wasn't always dark," she protested to the Internet, whose silence was deafening.

And so, Cristina found herself throughout the day spiraling even further down a dark hole of bitterness and self-blame. By the time evening had fallen, she had devolved into repeating lies that she often told herself like "You're too much for people!" and "When people find out who you are, they leave." The lies, at first, seemed like flies that buzzed around her head. A flick of her hand could dismiss them. But over the course of the day, the lies began to pick up steam until what once were pesky flies became a whole hornet's nest of negative words that buzzed around her in a sort of funnel cloud that sucked her down into a black hole.

Christian was unaware of how bad things were, but he did know that she was feeling down. Finally, unable to stand another minute of boredom, Christian banged on Cristina's door. "Hey, can I come in?" he called. Silence. "You've been in there all day," he complained. "You haven't even come out to go to the bathroom." Silence. "If you don't pee, you're gonna get a UTI," he warned. Silence.

"Okay, that's it!" he declared. "It might be your room, but this is my house. I'm coming in," he advised her, not waiting for a response. When he opened the door, he found her in the fetal position on the bed. He pulled her sweaty hair away from her face and saw her that she was extremely pale, and her lips were dry and cracking.

"What's this?" he questioned her. "Did you even drink anything today?" he demanded to know. Cristina didn't reply, but merely shook her head.

Christian ran from the room and returned with a large glass of cold water. "Come on. Get up," he ordered. "Drink this," he said. When Cristina didn't move, he picked her up by the shoulders and put the glass to her lips. "Drink!" he said rather sternly.

Cristina let the icy cold water seep into her mouth. It felt good, like rain after a scorching day. He stayed there for quite some time, coaxing sip after sip of water past her bloody, cracked lips.

"What would I have done if you got so dehydrated you had to go for an IV?!" he scolded. "You know how hard it is to go anywhere right now. What would we have done?" he asked rhetorically.

Cristina shrugged. "I don't want to be here anymore," she admitted. Christian looked down dejectedly. He had to admit that having her here had actually improved his mental health. He was sorry to hear that she was not happy there.

"I'm sorry you're stuck here with me when you don't want to be," he said.

"I don't mean here in your house. I mean here in this world," she managed to say through sobs that began to shake her body violently.

Christian said nothing, but inside he was panicking. For the first time, he understood what it felt like to hear those words as a person who loved the suffering soul. He had said those words to others, flippantly, with no thought of what it might feel like for them to hear them. Now he knew what it felt like. It felt like a giant ball was lodged in his throat and he couldn't swallow it down.

But he pulled himself together enough to tell her the thing his own therapist had told him many times before, "I can't care about your life more than you do. It only works when you care about your own damn life."

He determined silently that in the morning, he would call her doctor, her pharmacist, her pastor, her therapist --- literally anyone who might be able to speak some life into this situation. But for that night, he would stay in her room with that glass of water and force fluids until the sun came up. Lucky for him, he was too hyped up to sleep anyway.