My other saving grace, as much as I hate to admit it, has been my phone. And if I die and there is a heaven and Steve Jobs is there, I will personally thank him for an invention that kept me company in my final days. Despite my exhaustion, I’ve been able to muster the strength to text. I can communicate with Wes and Parisa and pretend I’m feeling much better than I am. They can’t hear my voice or see my face, so they don’t have to know that I’m actually on the decline. As long as I can still type a smiley face emoji, I’m giving them hope. And that’s also giving me the will to keep fighting.

I do not want to end up being memorialized over Zoom. I don’t want to meet the same fate as Andrew. It’s usually when I think about him that I feel the anxiety bubble up in the pit of my stomach. He was here in this same hospital. He had all the same thoughts and the same fears, and he didn’t make it out alive. Neither did four million other people around the world. Most of them had entire lifetimes ahead of them. My generation is like the opposite of baby boomers. What will they even call us? Generation Endangered? Extinct? Gone but not forgotten?

“Does your phone need a charge?” a nurse says, entering my room with a dose of Tylenol.

“Not yet,” I manage to respond.

She hands me the pills and a cup of water. As I swallow them down, she grabs two latex gloves. I watch as she ties them together and fills them with water.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Some of our patients miss getting to touch people,” she says. “See how this feels.”

She gestures to me to put out my hand, and then she interlaces the inflated gloves with my own fingers.

“It simulates the feeling of someone holding your hand.”

No, it doesn’t. I feel like I’m holding a water balloon, and that if I squeeze back too hard, it’ll pop. This does not replace having my moms here or my best friend or my boyfriend. It only makes me feel more alone, not to mention it’ll make it close to impossible to send a text. But when I look up to tell her all this, I can see that she is desperate to extend some sort of kindness or care.

“Thank you,” I say. “This feels really nice.”

In the distance, I hear the sounds of hospital staff hooting and hollering. The nurse apologizes and leaves to see what the commotion is all about. I want to yell at them to read the room. No one in the ICU is feeling especially celebratory right now.