I think I skipped an acute sense of Anger in exchange for emotional volatility. On the second day, my 4-year-old daughter approached the closed door, placed her mouth by the crack at the bottom, and announced very loudly that we could still be friends and “talk to each other.” I had been quarantined for maybe 28 hours, but this was so kind and pure that I cried. Even preschoolers can understand the necessity of connection. Verklempt has always been one of my favorite emotions.

Then I got to Bargaining. Maybe I could make the best of my isolated time by doing things to improve myself. I’ve been working on a book proposal on shared responsibility in parenting, of all things.

I’m a 210-pound male version of Marie Kondo, so I thought I could use this as an opportunity to sift through (or quietly throw away) all the things that my partner had put aside to organize “someday.” It’s been 12 years.

I felt useful when she consented to my going through her four boxes of pictures from college, most of which was packaging, negatives and duplicate prints. They gave me astonishing glimpses of ways our lives had intersected long before we even knew each other. I saw an old friend from the early 1990s in one of her pictures from a summer in Washington, D.C. She had taken a cruise down the Nile with a longtime colleague of mine. Her brother had gone to prom in Long Island with someone that I knew from college. We orbit each other’s lives like rotating planets throughout time, and I had the pictures to prove it.

On the third day, I was feeling so great that I did CrossFit in my room. My temperature was normal. I had no headache. I wasn’t coughing.

Toward the end of the workout, the doctor left a voice mail message: My test results were in, faster than expected. I called back and waited on hold. My heart beat with the anticipation of the next step in the grief cycle: Depression.

I tested positive. I didn’t listen to the doctor’s instructions, because I was envisioning the prickly crown-shaped cells infiltrating my body, closing off my lungs, and infecting my family and friends. I was still sweating from my workout, but now I was sick: my temperature spiked; I felt tired; I checked for shortness of breath. I felt more scared than truly sick. I feared death.