Eve wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting on her porch, breathing in the pine, absorbed in her thoughts, but the singing birds and the always comical bray of a neighbor's donkey were soothing, so she stayed there, quiet, not moving for fear the noise would resume its taunting assault.

In the days following the Texas event, the cracks in society's Stepford-like serenity were too wide and too many to ignore. Random acts of petty bullshit were once again on the rise, as though people were making up for lost time.

That was the emotional whirlwind, the desperation and depression, Eve was feeling.

History had taught her that, once she realized her misery was not her own, Eve knew how not to drown in it.

Like the emotional fishing net that she innately was, Eve had unknowingly flung herself into the collective zeitgeist and was scooping up the bottom-dwelling breakdowns of a frazzling population.

Her over-achieving sense of empathy emerged, Eve reckoned, at about the same time she emerged from her mother's womb in 1970.

She'd always been described as a "sensitive" child. That's what they called most empaths back in the '70s . Her intense concern for the feelings of the smallest of things -- Pet Rocks were her misunderstood babies, and don't even mention the genocide that came from her package of freeze-dried Sea Monkeys -- was seen as a delightful testament to Eve's budding imagination.

Every year growing up, Eve insisted on choosing the scraggliest, most-likely-to-be-firewood trees from the Christmas lots. She'd spend hours making them beautiful with individual strands of tinsel, sparkling lights, and cherished family ornaments. To this day, though she hadn't decorated a tree in decades, Eve swore Charlie Brown's tree was more glorious than any they'd ever dragged into Rockefeller Center.

By the time her tween years hit, along with the neon revolution that was the '80s, Eve's life goals were set: Be a writer; be a mom; and experience the kind of love Barbra Streisand had with Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born.

Well, Eve often told herself, at least she got one of them right.

She was never able to get pregnant -- not for a lack of trying.

And Eve picked her men like she picked her Christmas trees. It took her a lifetime to realize you can make them sparkle all you want, but, unlike an unloved pine, devotion, attention, and a handful of tinsel won't transform a man.

Again, an almost masochistic level of trying went into learning that painful lesson.

Eve was never a casual dater.

From her angst-filled high school years, she had fully immersed herself in one toxic long-term relationship after another. She didn't just beat dead horses. Eve mourned their deaths and then resurrected them with her beatings, only to bury the bastards again.

After two spectacularly failed marriages -- Eve was never one for doing things by halves -- she admitted to herself that she sucked at love. Micky Dolenz was wrong. True love didn't exist for the vast majority of people, and for those who, like her parents, did find it, it always, inevitably ended in heartbreak, because everyone, eventually, dies.

She was done pretending it would turn out any differently for her, so she was, she resolved, fucking done with love.

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And then she met Donnie.

Ahhh, Donald, the batshit-crazy love of Eve's unorthodox life.

That was the novel Eve could never bring herself to write. She wasn't naive enough to believe a happy ending could still come from that devastating wreckage, but writing it would mean reliving it, and she wasn't sure she could endure that.

She had every reason to hate him, but that uncomfortable feeling had faded long ago.

Instead, Eve recalled her relationship with Donnie with a sorrow that comes from knowing that, despite all her love -- despite all her loyalty, fierce determination, and a willingness to stick around that bordered on suicidal -- she was unable to save him from himself.

Eve met Donnie in Lake Havasu, Arizona, at the apex of her 20-year-long dance with hardcore drugs.

She didn't just leave her second marriage in Vegas. Eve left her professional career, her sense of stability, and a large chunk of her sanity and ran like Forest Gump into a world she knew almost nothing about.

After an impulsive stay in England and a depressing stint in Los Angeles, she landed, in her early 40s, back in the fucking desert, in a place called Donkey Acres, fresh off an oxycontin habit she still can't believe she survived and strangely ready for what would be the most self-defining, meth-fueled dip into the crazy end of life's inflatable kiddie pool that Eve had ever known.

Eve wasn't proud of her former drug use, but neither was she ashamed of it. If anything, she was just profoundly grateful that she made it through it -- hubby number two, his brother, and more than a few good friends weren't so lucky -- and she was genuinely filled with joy in the knowledge that she never had to experience the exorcism that comes with running out of opiates or watch tweakers take apart her television ever again.

Never.

But she was up to her eyeballs in it when she met Donnie, and to pretend otherwise would just be dishonest. And Eve was always honest, to a fault.

Not because she was pious, but because she couldn't understand why anyone would bother with the drama that always flows from lying. Being truthful was, like many things in Eve's mind, a black-and-white issue: Don't do things you're ashamed of, and there's no reason to lie about it. Make choices you believe in, and the people who don't get it can go to hell.

Nothing else made sense to her.

In all her time as an enthusiastic drug user, she had never dealt them, stolen for them, or traded sex for them. She was, if nothing else, an honest dope fiend, a veritable Sandra Dee in a world of strung-out Rizzos. That didn't make her better than the Rizzos in Eve's mind. In some ways, she envied their indifference.

The property in Donkey Acres where Eve had parked the 5th wheel she'd bartered away her Karman Ghia for was, when she first found herself there, like a happy hippie commune... if by "hippies," you meant outlaw bikers and the kind of deeply damaged, often violent souls they attract.

The owner of the property was a gruff, 60-something biker named R.J., who Eve was convinced had to have a heart of gold.

R.J. was the shot-caller, but the matriarch of the enterprise -- and it was a tri-state enterprise built on Mexican heroin and crystal meth -- was his mother, who lived in an RV next to the main house.

Every patched-up Harley rider who roared up to do business with her son first paid Grandma, as she was known by all, their respects.

If Rita Hayworth's aging "Gilda" ever broke truly bad in Arizona, she would be the brash embodiment of 80-year-old Grandma, and Eve fell in love with her immediately.

One night, soon after Eve had settled in and as the property's regulars were gathering for beers by the nightly bonfire, up walked Donnie -- fresh, Eve would later learn, from 30 days in the Kingman County jail -- looking like a glowing Prodigal Son of Anarchy.

An old coot named Pinky was considered the First Lieutenant on the property, but Donnie was R.J.'s real right hand, and everyone -- including the land's unpredictable guard dog, Grift -- knew it.

He was 15 years her junior, resembled a young Johnny Depp, and his mother, Eve already knew, was a profoundly disturbed, proudly psychotic clusterfuck.

He was also the most powerful empath Eve had ever met.

They had just exchanged names when Donnie looked at her, smiled sweetly, and said, "You never know if you're living in the past, present, or future, do you?"

The undeniable truth of those words, spoken so matter-of-factly in a way she had never before considered articulating them, pierced her like a dagger, and Eve was well on her way to falling in love all over again, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

For ten years, longer than the combined years of either of her two official marriages, Eve and Donnie were inseparable. They fought the world together... when they weren't fighting each other.

Grandma had once told them, "You two can't live without each other, and, if you stay together, you're going to kill each other."

But together they stayed, clawing their way out of Donkey Acres, out of jail, out of joblessness, out of homelessness, and, at last, out of Arizona.

And when they had achieved. with a lot of loving help from Eve's father, a dependable income and a paid-for little home -- when they had nothing left to do but be happy -- Donnie went back to meth, and everything Eve had believed God had finally blessed her with imploded in a meaningless heap of heartbreak.

That happened just weeks before California's COVID lockdowns began.

For all her faith, Eve was alone during a global pandemic, raging at a God she no longer believed existed.