Covid-19 turned me into a kleptomaniac.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. Let me explain.

It was March 13, 2020. Friday the thirteenth. Well, that certainly was fitting for what was about to happen.

After work, I walked through the front doors of my local Trader Joe’s but somehow, instead of finding a grocery store stocked with honey-glazed turkey, milk, and Panda Puffs, I found myself in an alternate universe; an apocalyptic madhouse. The scene before me was one ripped from a sci-fi horror film. Which is totally my least favorite movie genre.

For a couple days, my friends had been posting photos online that were so unrecognizable to my brain that I was unable—literally incapable—of understanding what I was seeing. I recognized the items in the photos, but how they were arranged made not an ounce of sense. In one photo: trunks of cars overflowing with pyramids of toilet paper and canned goods. The other photo: rows of empty store shelves. Never did the items in both photos appear together, the way they should have. The shelves had lost their purpose, holding nothing, outlining the space where items needed to fill our pantries were normally kept, ready to feed the neighborhood. It had only been two days since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a global pandemic. But again, that kind of stuff only happens in movies. The photos had to be staged. Doctored.

Right?

The empty, bare-to-the-bones shelves surrounding me were not a Photoshop magic trick. I was seeing with my own two eyes the same eerie images of shiny, metal shelves lining the aisles of a grocery store holding nothing more than air. A pattern of lines outlining the market in a grid; a blueprint for where supplies and food and basic necessities were easily accessed, but, in the blink of an eye, disappeared.

But I went through the motions anyway.

First stop: granola. While this section was picked over, it wasn’t completely bare. Though I had to make peace with grabbing a healthier nut-and-fruit option in place of my typical sugary granola slathered in sweet maple. Maybe this pandemic would have some unforeseen benefits, like forcing better eating habits on me.

Next up was produce. No problem there. The short shelf-lives of fresh fruits and veggies make it impossible to buy them in bulk. One pound of strawberries, a tub of cherry tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas found their way into my cart with ease.

It’s when I arrived in Dairy that things started to feel… off. There was absolutely no milk left. Not even skim. All varieties of milk, all gone. My heart rate elevated slightly.

A few feet over, a handful of yogurt cups—less than a dozen—remained in the refrigerated section like the puny kids that get picked last for the kickball team. It felt strange reaching for the stragglers. Irrationally, I worried that something must have been wrong with the remaining Greek yogurts, all of which, I came to realize, were coconut flavored: my favorite. I felt personally insulted. As if coconut and its tropical mild sweetness was somehow inferior. As if it wasn’t good enough to hoard. What kind of injustice was this? I wanted to stand up for my beloved coconut yogurt, adopt them all and take them home with me, but I only grabbed six. Taking them all would make me one of them: a panic buyer. By leaving the last handful of coconut yogurt cups, I was: A) remaining calm, and B) doing a solid for the next person craving tropical probiotic-filled dairy.

The panic that was bubbling up somewhere deep inside me—the panic that I was trying hard to ignore—erupted when I turned down the frozen aisle. Was my mouth agape? Did my brows furrow? Had I audibly gasped? It was all a horrific blur. Anger, fear, and confusion combined to create an unbearable unease now coursing through my veins. There was nothing. No food. At all. Every bin: white, empty, and cleaned out.

This was panic.

I walked slowly, my face scrunching with uncertainty and unfamiliarity, unable to comprehend this strange scene. This grocery store without groceries. It was a parallel universe where not everyone would survive. If not from the virus, then from the apparent lack of food.

A familiar song sang out of the ceiling speakers as I gingerly stepped farther into the pillaged frozen aisle: Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day.” The song’s lyrics sounded eerily different under those circumstances.

Well, that’ll be the day, when you say goodbye

Yes, that’ll be the day, when you make me cry

You say you’re gonna leave, you know it’s lie

‘Cause that’ll be the day… when I die.

“When I die” kept ringing in my ears. I was suddenly transplanted into a world with a mysterious, deadly virus, and, evidently, a sudden food shortage. What else was the Universe going to throw at us? Was this the beginning of the end of the world? ‘Cause that could really get in the way of girl’s weekly grocery run.

Mid-way down the aisle, I saw what should have been a reassuring sight, but instead the curious scene only added to my confusion. One bin, which held frozen chow mein, was completely full. One single bin, in a sea of sixty or so bins, offered food. It was like looking through a Cheesecake Factory menu whose thirty-plus pages have all been torn out except for the Skinnylicious page. But what if I wanted a Glamburger? On the menu that night was one item, and one item only: frozen chow mein. I walked away, leaving the cold bags untouched, reluctant to engage in this abnormal reality. All I wanted to do was get out of the so-called frozen aisle, ransacked and left nearly bare by a fear running through my town, my country, the world.

I knew my next stop would be fruitless, but I had to try: toilet paper. I’d been hearing about people stockpiling it, leaving not a single roll behind. But that seemed so insane that I wasn’t worried. Surely, that couldn’t be happening in my own neighborhood. One peek down the hygiene aisle, however, was enough to confirm that everyone had indeed lost their minds. Once again, the shelves were Empty with a capital E.

The deli section: no cheese, no meat, all bare.

The bakery offered no bread. Some lucky panic buyer got all the little pull-apart Hawaiian rolls. Even the loaves of multi-grain bread that are always kind of hard were sold out.

Stupidly, I pulled out my grocery list to see how I was doing. I’d been able to get just four items on the list. Everything else was sold out. I began desperately snaking through the aisles, combing for anything edible. But there were no cans of soup, no jars of jam, no bags of dry pretzels which I don’t even like. Weirdly, three lonely looking canisters of parmesan cheese sat on an otherwise empty shelf. I grabbed one, imagining myself spooning in the cheesy powder as a desperate dinner.

At the register, looking over my mostly empty cart, I impulsively snatched two sticks of beef jerky, planning for another sad meal. When I took my receipt, my fingers touched the tips of the cashier, and a jolt of danger flashed through me. I wasn’t even allowed to touch my own face anymore, let alone someone else’s hands.

In a daze, I hauled my grab-bag of oddities back home, retracing my steps. Except now everything looked different. The clouds were grayer. The shadows underneath the L were darker. And the pit in my stomach would not stop reminding me that the future was uncertain.

This was fear.

At home, after I calmed down and realized that I probably wouldn’t starve to death so long as I didn’t tire of jerky—that wasn’t going to sell out any time soon—I got back to the matter at the top of my priority list: I took stock of my toilet paper supply. It was down to a paltry two rolls.

This is when things began to change. This is when I jumped on the bandwagon everyone else—everyone with the 72-packs of two-ply and bagfuls of maple-glazed granola—was already on. I had to fend for myself.

Sunday, March 15, 2020. I was finishing up my shift at my second job dee-jaying at a radio station in Crystal Lake—and I was alone. In the studio sat two of my biggest reusable bags (because even during a public health crisis I still love the environment) that would soon be filled with as many rolls of toilet paper I could get my constantly-sanitized hands on. First, I raided the men’s room. Inside the pickle green cabinet sat a shockingly well-stocked amount of toilet tissue, neatly stacked into towers. I opened one of my reusable bags, took my arm and knocked all but one tower of T.P. into it. Next, in the women’s room, an unfair secret reared its ugly head, momentarily sidetracking me from my mission to blatantly steal from my employer: the women’s room had a mere fraction of the toilet paper as the men’s room. I tried to rationalize. We use more, I told myself. But inside I was shouting, Down with the patriarchy! I filled the other bag, sent up a silent apology to the ladies of the radio station, and left what I hoped would be a sufficient two rolls until the station was restocked.

I loaded my ill-gotten toiletries into the trunk of my car. Dozens of individually wrapped rolls of toilet tissue threatened to tumble out of my two reusable bags. My trunk looked like a toilet-paper filled ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese. Did I really just loot the bathrooms at work? Who had I become? I slammed the trunk door closed and got behind the wheel, ready to haul my treasure back home, justifying my actions of petty thievery. In less than a week, I’d checked three stores and Amazon for toilet paper and they were all out. That’s right: The Internet was out of toilet paper. Rare digitally-remastered DVD of the 1986 cult classic BMX film Rad? Readily available online. But a measly four-pack of Angel Soft? OUT OF STOCK. This was a kind of crazy I couldn’t have dreamed up in my nightmares, and it was shamelessly staring us all in the face down all the desolate tissue aisles of America. I felt like I had to do whatever it took to survive. I wanted to buy my two-ply like a normal person, but a virus spreading like wildfire left in its wake an unwanted “new normal,” and in this new reality, I needed to adapt.

I became a crazed, Cottonelle klepto.

Fast forward a little more than a year. April 19, 2021. For the second time in three weeks, I drove to an old Kmart twelve miles away. Not to search their aisles for toilet paper—that shortage had long since been restocked, ending my days as a petty thief—but to get the second and final syringe filled with the Covid vaccine stuck in my arm. This time, it wasn’t as shocking seeing the police cars stationed by the entrance, the traffic barricades controlling the endless stream of cars snaking for a spot in the parking lot. If an empty frozen aisle at Trader Joe’s was unsettling, then walking into a now defunct big box store serving as a mass vaccination clinic crawling with uniformed Army soldiers, medically-supplied nurses, and thousands of members of the community all ready to revert back to the old normal was, well, surreal. And what was once an uncomfortable sight was now almost comforting: everyone’s faces hidden underneath masks that not only provided protection from contaminated droplets but also served as emotional security blankets. This was not the typical Kmart experience of my youth.

“After your shot,” the man dressed in Army fatigues casually said as he scanned my QR code at the entrance, “make sure to check out the blue light specials.” Laughter was muffled but not silenced by my face mask. The tension I hadn’t realized was stiffening all my muscles immediately softened at the soldier’s dad joke. He was proud of himself—adding the task of putting the public at ease to his duties of checking everyone in. While I couldn’t see a toothy grin or laugh lines at the corners of his mask-covered mouth, I knew that he was smiling—I could see it in his eyes. A trick we’d all become accustomed to by then when looking at friends’ masked selfies—smiles now appeared a little higher on our faces, twinkling in our eyes.

The line snaked around the old Kmart, its insides long since gutted, aisles and shelves and racks removed. Thirty minutes later, I was at the registration booth, where a perky woman donned in her Army uniform greeted me with as much enthusiasm as an NFL cheerleader.

“Cubs or Cardinals?” she asked while looking over my identification.

I tried not to wince at both of those forbidden words. “Sox,” came my sober reply, reminding her that Chicago has two baseball teams.

After a few minutes, I was ushered to an available nurse. This time, I didn’t instinctively nudge the foldable chair back a few inches before taking a seat like I had three weeks prior. The six-foot rule had become second nature, and, when receiving my first dose of the life-saving serum, I instinctively backed my seat away from the nurse. After laughing at myself—after all, she was already vaccinated and needed to be much closer than six feet to prick my arm—I moved closer, wondering if she’d noticed my hesitancy to ignore the precautionary social distancing rule that we’d all become so used to. Had other people moved their chairs back too?

It was April: my birth month. Under normal circumstances, I’d buy myself a new book or a heavily-frosted cupcake as a gift for myself. But we were months away from the ever-appealing “normal,” so I settled for a free vaccination as my birthday present to myself. That was a first. And hopefully a last. One-size-fits-all and no gift receipt needed.

The nurse was right about to stick me with my final dose when, suddenly, she stopped a volunteer. The urgency in her voice indicated that this was a matter of utmost importance, and for a split second, I worried there might be something wrong. Had the vaccination supply gone bad? Did I not wait the correct number of days for my second shot? It was worse:

“Can you get me a candy bar? One of the big ones, not the fun size.”

Ah, yes. A sudden sugar craving with no readily available candy bar to satisfy it. Something was indeed wrong.

The volunteer replied, “Yeah, what kind?”

“What’s the one with the soft middle? Not Three Musketeers, the other one.”

“Milky Way?”

“Yes! Milky Way! Will you get me a big Milky Way?”

The loud grumble in my stomach reminded me that it was nearing lunch time, and it had been hours since my small breakfast. I chimed in. “Think I could get in on that?” I was one-hundred percent kidding, which the nurse appreciated with a loud boisterous laugh echoing inside her face shield. A second later, I had a needle in my arm. As soon as the Band-Aid was in place, the volunteer was back, handing a full-size Milky Way to the nurse who’d just administered something that I’d been anxiously waiting for since I first heard the word “coronavirus” over a year earlier. She deserved that Milky Way.

Before I rolled my sleeve back down, the volunteer stepped before me, holding out a second full size Milky Way bar in his hand. I looked up, smiling with my eyes, and took the candy from him. I thanked him profusely for his chocolate-laden generosity, even more than I’d thanked the nurse for potentially saving my life. Not because I appreciated chocolate covered caramel more than a pandemic-ending vaccine—though my sweet tooth is a force to be reckoned with—but because it was a simple delightful gesture that I wasn’t expecting. The pandemic broke everything down to nothing but the essentials, and then a non-essential—yet delicious—treat appeared before me. That Milky Way was the one colorful wildflower that bloomed among a hopeless field of weeds and brown grass. Maybe we really were approaching the end of this horrible chapter in our lives.

It sounds silly, but it felt like the volunteer’s simple gesture represented all of humanity taking care of each other during the previous year. This caramelly chocolatey sugary candy bar wrapped in shiny foil stood for my boss offering to bring me food when the stay-at-home order was first implemented; my mom delivering groceries to her sister every month; my co-worker shipping everyone on the team packages of toilet paper at Christmas. This candy bar from a thoughtful stranger said: We’re all in this together.

It was the opposite of everyone hoarding toilet paper and leaving store shelves bare. The opposite of a desperate weekend dee-jay raiding the bathrooms at work. It was a realization that, in order to get through this, we can’t simply fend for ourselves. Instead, to get to the finish line of this pandemic, we need to adopt an all-for-one and one-for-all state of mind.

Well, that’s Three Musketeers. But you get the point.

Covid-19 might have temporarily turned me into a crazed kleptomaniac, but in the long run, despite all the horrible havoc it wreaked on society, it did have one positive effect on me: It turned me—and perhaps everyone—into someone who appreciates the little things. The things we used to take for granted. Like hugs, smiles, toilet paper, and candy bars. For over a year, we had to adjust to a life without some of those things, and it was a shocking reality check that nothing is guaranteed. Life is short. Life is precious.

Later, at home, as I sank my teeth into my Milky Way, it hit me: When we all look out for each other, even when times are tough, life can also be pretty sweet.

I’m a voice actor and audio producer who has lived in Evanston since 2016. When I’m not indulging my creative juices, I’m either petting my cat, eating too many carbs, or running along the shores of Lake Michigan. The following essay illustrates the emotional stages I progressed through during the Covid-19 pandemic. They can find me at my website at www.laurabotten.com and on Instagram.com/SpaghettiFriendship where I'm chronicling my first book.