Apples

After a month, I have almost finished Liane Moriarty's novel Apples Never Fall.

The first chapter of the novel starts in a far corner of a café where four siblings leaned over a round table, their foreheads almost touched. At the last few chapters, the tables and chairs were piled up on top of each other gathering dust in the corner; they were only doing takeaway coffees. No more table service.

Well, that's exactly what we'd found our life turns out to be recently. This is a month we have gone through something so chaotic, so unexpected and volatile, so entirely out of our control and out of our imagination, it is like a splash of icy water on a snowy day. Ukrainian residents are facing nightly air strikes. Disease outbreaks are spreading like wildfire in our local nursing homes. Round-the-clock crisis happens in hospitals with shortage of beds and shortage of mortuary spaces. I think we might have come close to the World War III.

For the first time ever, it occurred to us that the healthcare system probably would collapse and fall like a tower of Jenga. I don't know if apples would ever fall, but I shall pray that ours won't fall.