Her big brown eyes look dismayed and embarrassed after these displays of affection, which is usually enough to make me laugh. She tolerated most of my hugs, and once, when I was in the depths of late-winter depression, she let me pick her up and hold her tiny, warm chest to my forehead for a few seconds. Many days, she was the only living thing I spoke to, and the only one I touched. In a year when time felt slippery, Midge kept track of it-waking me up for breakfast, waging a nightly campaign for dinner, huffing and snorting and pacing until I got up from work to play fetch with her stuffed crocodile for a few minutes. Every day, she climbed up the back of the couch to snooze atop its rear cushions, her face pointed toward mine at eye level while I worked at the kitchen table.

Whether she was sitting on a blanket in the kitchen while I cooked, frowning at me from a safe distance while I did yoga, or watching me do chores from beneath the leaves of her favorite enormous tropical houseplant, she bore witness to a year I spent otherwise alone. In many ways, she’s been a perfect pandemic pal: She hates interacting with others she loves to sit on the couch she long ago assessed sneezes as an existential threat. Since last March, Midge and I have been testing the bounds of what it means to live in my very small apartment together. I ask her questions she doesn’t answer-if she’s my booboo (yes), if she’s a big girl (relatively speaking), if she has a kibble tummy (a little bit). Now almost five years old, she has grown to tolerate me. At 12 pounds, she is twice as big as the most desirable Chihuahuas, and she has a moderately bad personality, which is maybe why the puppy mill where she spent the first year of her life decided it didn’t want any more of her robust and extremely rude babies. She’s been my booboo since 2018, when I brought her home from a cat shelter, where she had been stashed by a Long Island dog rescue after her foster family gave her back-she didn’t like them, or anyone, and cats aren’t looking for new friends. The question is never answered by Midge, my agoraphobic Chihuahua, but the answer is obvious. It’s come up time and again, day and night, as frequently in my post-vaccination spring and summer as it did in the dark moments of the pandemic’s first wave: Are you my booboo? S ince the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I have asked one question more than any other. This article was published online on July 29, 2021.

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