On a particularly lonely Saturday night, triggered by a friend’s quarantine engagement, I opened my favorite dating app.

Seven agonizing minutes later, the doctor entered the room. She was young and confusingly chipper given the setting. When she asked what brought me in, I confessed that I thought I might have the virus and outlined my symptoms: sore throat, headache, a fever of 102. “Hmm,” she said, “that doesn’t sound like Covid, but it does present differently in different people. Do you have any reason to believe you were in contact with someone who was infected?”

Swiping was one thing; agreeing to go on a date was something else entirely. Like everyone else, I had just spent months acclimating to a Black Mirror version of reality where “stranger danger” had a whole new meaning. Was dating worth having a cotton swab shoved up my nose on a recurring basis? Maybe not. Was it worth the judgment of my hypercautious roommate? Definitely not. Was it worth elevating my exposure to a life-threatening illness plaguing the globe? Not even a little bit. But it’s incredible the lengths one will go to when severely bored and horny.

Regret didn’t come the next morning, but it did the morning after that. It had been 36 hours since I’d shared a cigarette with a man on his fire escape; why did my throat still feel scratchy? Did I have a fever or was it just hot in my apartment? As the Sunday scaries crept in, so did my Covid fears. I found myself in a familiar post-date shame spiral, doom scrolling WebMD, and oscillating between worry and guilt. I drank a liter of Emergen-C as if Dr. Fauci had prescribed it, and listened to a sleep podcast in an attempt to muffle my anxious thoughts.

I met him at a park just after 8 p.m. It was one of those summer evenings where the warmth of the day still hung in the air. He brought beers and I brought the blanket. I teased him about his haircut (he needed one) and he told me I smelled good (I did). When the beer cans were empty and there was no longer a need to be upright, he suggested we stargaze. We peered up and after a single quiet moment, realized there were no stars to gaze at and laughed in unison. Then he went in for a kiss.

I spent the rest of that week taking penicillin and thanking the universe for the near-miss. As for the guy, I was so relieved that he didn’t give me Covid that I couldn’t care less that he gave me strep — an illness that should be reserved for 13-year-olds who share mall Slurpees. Unfortunately, the situation didn’t exactly lay the foundation for a legendary romance, and ultimately, we never saw each other again.

I braced for a lecture or judgy scowl, but her bedside manner remained unchanged. She grabbed a long cotton swab and asked me to open my mouth. “I thought that went up my nose?” I said, confused.

Unfortunately, Fermi died of cancer a few years later without the opportunity to publish a paper on the subject. Regardless, his argument was so jarring that the question outlived him and became known as the Fermi paradox. The debate still rages today, books of objections and explanations have been published, but the question remains unanswered.

I stuck out my tongue and she inserted the swab as my eyes welled up and I tried not to gag. Within a few minutes, a rapid test confirmed that her suspicions were right. On my walk home, I rejoiced — maybe the first time in history that someone celebrated a strep throat diagnosis. Then I winced because it still felt like I was swallowing knives.

Back in the fifties, physicist Enrico Fermi estimated that it would take a technologically advanced civilization a pinch of cosmic time to colonize the entire Milky Way, even without faster-than-light travel capability. Then, during lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fermi brought this idea to some of his colleagues. According to them, the conversation ended with the famous question that would haunt scientists for years to come: “But where is everybody?”

I spent the rest of that week taking penicillin and thanking the universe for the near-miss. As for the guy, I was so relieved that he didn’t give me Covid that I couldn’t care less that he gave me strep — an illness that should be reserved for 13-year-olds who share mall Slurpees. Unfortunately, the situation didn’t exactly lay the foundation for a legendary romance, and ultimately, we never saw each other again.

We spent the next hour doing an uncanny impression of Annoyingly Affectionate Park Couple before walking back to his house hand-in-hand. I won’t say that I had a plan for the evening, but I will say that I shaved my legs when I knew I’d be wearing pants. Perhaps under other circumstances, we would’ve stopped at a bar — stoke the fire, give me a chance to tweeze the blades of grass out of my hair. But this was a Covid date and there were no rules. Or rather, there were many rules, but we’d already broken all of them.

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e?” You wonder. Probably nothing. You aren’t alone, either. It’s common to have a little bit of mess around the house when you work 40 hours a week, have children, and all you want to do when the weekend comes is to relax and have fun!

I woke up early the next day and still felt sick. I went immediately to urgent care. I sat in a waiting room full of people and wondered how many of them were about to test positive for Covid-19. Eventually, my name was called, and I was led to a tiny room and told to wait for the attending physician. I sat in a chair that creaked every time I crossed and uncrossed my legs. On the wall hung a poster that illustrated how Covid transmission is reduced significantly when two parties wear a mask. Not illustrated was the risk of transmission when two people touch tongues in a park but I assumed it was high. I closed my eyes tightly and let out a sigh.

After a few witty text exchanges and a pre-date phone call that lasted for seven(!) hours, I was going into the night with a level of unbridled enthusiasm I hadn’t experienced since the words “first date” were followed by “ever.” I mellowed this out with a large glass of pinot noir which I drank as I listened to Lizzo and tried on the same two outfits four different times. It was a scene so basic that I would’ve been embarrassed if I weren’t so amped.

“In 1974, astronomer Michael Hart published the first paper building on Fermi’s argument. Hart proposed that if an alien civilization had evolved in our galaxy, it would have developed interstellar travel and colonized its neighboring stars. These colonies would, in turn, launch colonizing expeditions to their neighboring stars, and so on, occupying the entire Milky Way within two million years.” -Excerpt from my book K3