Lily and Lyle

If there is one thing I know I am not, it is full of shit, so I'm not going to lie to y'all. Early March, when rumors of the pandemic started stirring, I was not worried about it. When they locked down Chicago, I was OK with it. Look, I moved out of my house when I was 15 years old. I had a baby by the time I was 17 and at 18, I moved across the country with no one but my baby and his dad. And by 21, I moved back to raise my son. You want to talk social distancing, quarantine, have a baby at 17 and commit to raising it. I was made for this.

In fact, I was better off post pandemic lockdown than I was before. My employers had agreed to pick me up and drop me off from work, saving me money on Ubers and transportation period. My now 24-year-old son had agreed to do my laundry and my groceries, okay. Coronavirus seemed to be a come-up for me.

I was fine until about week three. I mean, I was still fine with it by week three, but in week three, I was more in my head.

I think a lot of people were asking ourselves those existential "Why am I here, what is my purpose? How long will this last? Why did I marry you? Why did I have kids? Oh no. What did I do with my life?" Right? All those questions. The earworm that was that was playing in my head at the time was "You're going to die alone, Lily. And it stemmed from an e-mail that I received in 2016 from a then friend I had a falling out with on Facebook who was mad. And wouldn't stop e-mailing me. And in one of the last emails he said to me, I was going to die alone and I wrote it off as like you're psycho, so full of shit.

But now. End of March 2020. Where I could catch coronavirus, easily die in my apartment, and nobody would find me until they reported the smell.

I, a single 42-year-old asexual Afro Latina who lives on the west side of Chicago, who doesn't know her neighbors, and who a lot of people don't know where I live -- nobody knows where I live. Very few. While I may be social on the Internet and very social in public, if I don't show up to a place or I don't show up to an event, people just assume I'm doing something else. I'm a very extroverted loner.

I started to worry. I asked my son to check on me, and he's like, "No, I'm not going to check on you every day, you're going to be fine." I started joining more groups. I got myself more busy on the Internet. But again, if I don't show up or post or something, people just assume I'm doing something else.

This wasn't helping to get this earworm out of my head, this fear that was settling in.

So I just figured I got to get something to keep my mind off of this thing that I'm afraid of will happen.

And they say thoughts become things or just, if I kept thinking it, it was probably going to happen, so you know what? How do I start? Let's get busy doing something else. And I decided, OK, I got it. I'll get a pet. And I did.

And on April 14, 2020, Lyle the Bearded Dragon moved into my home.

He was the size of my pinky in a 20-gallon tank that my son dropped off, and right away I fell in love with him. Love at first sight. I started doing things for this bearded dragon that I didn't even do for my flesh-and-blood son. Like a housing upgrade within a week.

Should've seen the look on my son's face when I asked him to go pick up a tank and the south side of Chicago, 55-gallon tank. "Can you go pick up this thing?"

"What? What are we talking about?"

But he did it because he knew how much this lizard meant to me. I remember, when I first had my son, how people suggested that I should make him baby food because baby food, organic baby food is so good for them. All you got to do is boil carrots, mash 'em down, put them in jars, stick 'em in the fridge. I was like, "What, are you crazy? Nobody got time for that." But you know what I had time for in a pandemic? Building a three-tier mealworm farm so that Lyle didn't have to wait for his food to come from no big-box pet store. No, he got that gourmet shit.

I also was meal prepping foods for him that I myself don't eat like Swiss chard and endive and dandelion greens. I mean, Lyle was living it up.

So know this, people: that I knew something was up in mid to late June when our little bath time poop game didn't end in him pooping in the water while I went and got his towel. I came back to the sink and he hadn't pooped and I was like, "Wait a second. You always poop when I turn around to go get your towel."

It started out as a frustration, but because it happened every time, I just made it a game where I'm like, “OK, here I go to get your towel” and poop! I never saw him do it.

He's a little bathroom shy. But when that didn't happen in June, I got concerned and then he started losing weight and I had to find an exotic pet vet to see him. I took him in and I couldn't even go into the room with him. I had to sit in the car and wait and sit in my son's car just worried.

The vet's like "what is he eating?" And I was like, "Well, you know, all these vegetables and greens and and mealworms that I breed for him." And wouldn't you know it, it was the mealworms that almost killed him?

She sent me home with an antibiotic in case he had a stomach infection and a stool loosener.

And with every day that passed, because they needed a stool sample, every day that passed and he didn't poop, I got more and more worried. My heart sank more and more in my stomach.

And this isn't something that you can really just announce on Facebook during a pandemic. Don't nobody want to send no prayers out to your damn lizard. And I didn't want to bother people with that kind of like request. So I dealt with this by myself. When people asked me how Lyle was, I didn't want to get into too much about him because I just felt it wasn't important, all things considered. Right. So I just waited. And waited for this poop. When it finally came, it was the most beautiful, glorious little poop I'd ever seen. I scooped it up into the container they gave me and I called his big brother like "Your little brother pooped, your little brother pooped!"

My son's like, "OK, Mom, I'm at work, can you not?" And I was like, “You don't understand, your little brother's going to be OK! It's a big, beautiful poop."

And he hung up on me. I took the poop in, it tested negative for parasites, another win. And then I put him on a diet of different proteins, same greens. When I tell you that Lyle is like my soul mate, I'm not lying. I don't feel like I'm lying. Because we're so much alike in that we love our space. Like he can't have anyone in his space. I can't have anyone in my space. We appreciate the people that nourish us and love us and care for us.

And we both know that dying alone is not the worst way to die. It's being full of shit when we die that's far worse than that. I'm kidding. It's that there's no point in worrying how I'm going to die. It's just making sure that while I'm alive, I'm caring for and making an impact on the people and things that really matter. And thanks to Lyle coming into my life in 2020, I won't lose sight of that.