We’re Spending 14 Days in a Thai Quarantine Hotel

And we’re not allowed to have alcohol delivered.

The hotel room isn’t the problem. It’s a nice hotel room in a nice hotel. It has a desk and a television, a kidney-bean shaped couch, a lovely king-sized bed, a shower and a bathtub, an exercise bike (we paid extra for this amenity), and a balcony that is big enough to lie down on if you keep your flesh flush to the sliding glass door. The balcony looks out over a road that is fairly calm, several high-rises, a cluster of palm trees, and a small Buddhist shrine complete with a gold spire and four white stone elephants. No, the hotel room isn’t the problem. The problem might be that I’m sharing 500 square feet with another person for 14 days and nights, and neither of us are allowed to leave. This is government quarantine.

In December 2020, I threw my hands up and put my foot down and demanded that my fiance find a way to leave the United States with me. I’m exaggerating; I whimper-sobbed it from a blanket-and-sweatpant pile on our living room floor. My dad, who was in Ohio, had just been released from a week in the hospital with Covid-19, and my mom was just starting to recover her sense of smell. My grandpa, who was in Oklahoma, went into the hospital with Covid-19 on the same day as my dad, but he didn’t make it home. All of this happened while I was teaching both 1st and 2nd grade…