I did not know I was going through a depression until a few days after the first COVID-19 death in the US was reported. This was in early March. I was working on a feature about how the assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani, on January 3 in Baghdad, had affected the lives of Iranian Americans in the Pacific Northwest. There was the report of an Iranian American family being held at the border by US officials. There was the memo sent from the Seattle Field Office of Customs and Border Patrol to border agents. Its heading: “Iranian Supreme Leader vows Forceful Revenge after US Kills Maj. General Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad — Threat Alert High.” And there was the Iranian American woman who was questioned and followed by border agents for many miles. I was putting all of this together, and reading about the political history of Iran, and eating at Iranian American restaurants in Bellevue, and learning about the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, which happened on March 19, the first day of spring, when the city around me began rapidly changing into something I had not seen since 9/11.

Workers in the tech sector were the first to leave the city after the news of the COVID-19 death. They were told to go home and telecommute for the next two or so weeks. The city became emptier and emptier. Restaurants closed earlier. Traffic jams entirely vanished. And I found myself going to work as the sole passenger on a Metro bus. And yet, I was not bothered by any of these ominous developments. Why was I so at ease? I knew at the time that the situation was only going to get worse. It didn't take much imagination to see that what was happening in Iran and Italy was going to happen in Seattle, in Washington State, in the USA. I was also very aware of the fact that we were nowhere near prepared for the coming crisis. But, weirdly, inwardly, I was emotionally prepared (if we can call it that) for these empty streets and bars and cafes and bookstores. And the more the surrounding gloom grew, the more at peace I was. Why?

And then it happened. This was at the end of the first week of March. I was on the bus and alone and reading on the phone about social distancing. To be successful, the program required something Americans had not experienced since the Second World War, which is a full break from the logic and centrality of the market. The idea that most of us have of capitalism is that it's indispensable. We even have a popular sect in our culture, preppers, that believes if financial markets crash we will be reduced to a Hobbesian "war of all against all." These people are ready for the road. But the prepper apocalypse is still consistent with what Margret Thatcher described in the late 1980s as "...there is no alternative" (TINA). The individual of market competition morphs into the individual in the wild with canned food in the bag and an AR-15 in the hand.

Social distancing does not send us into the wilderness but into our homes. It also brings us closer together as it tells us to stay apart. It represents a world that is not compossible with methodological individualism. Its compossibilities are radically different from what we are accustomed to.

Now, when we speak of things being compossible, we mean that they agree with each other, and the greater this agreement is, the easier it is for these activities and things to leave the realm of potential and enter reality. Cars are compossible with the individualism of capitalist competition, with the logic of self-interest, with preppers. Social distancing is compossible with universalized health care and food stamps and unemployment insurance. Social distancing subordinates the market.

All of this was on my mind when the bus arrived at my stop; then as I disembarked, as I stepped onto a part of sidewalk next to Queen Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant, I felt something that can only be described as seawater retreating from the beach of my inner being. Then I saw for the first time the source of my calm. I was in a depression. It had been there since my brother passed on July 29, 2019. I thought all along I had been sad, but this is not the same as depression. Sadness always has some hope and light mixed in it. Depression is like the end of the world, or like the movie Melancholia, which my friend and philosopher Steven Shaviro described as an "intimate notebook on depression, and [a] metaphysical speculation on last things."

On March 16, I walked to Rainier Park. It was the first official day of social distancing. I sat on a park bench by myself and watched the empty buses heading up and down Rainier Avenue, I also noticed fewer planes in the sky, which was clear and blue, and I saw young people hanging around with nothing really to do: home was boring, the park was boring, this virus was just ruining everything. It was then, on the bench, that I felt happy for the first time in months. The exposed depression, which had been hardening in me like of layer of rock turned out to be liberating. The feeling that everything was coming to an end enabled me to deeply feel or relate to a society that had been turned upside down. I went out of joint in the hospital room my brother spent the end of his life; but I was rejoined here, in a city, country, a world that had to share a crisis.