It feels time to share the pandemic story no one asked for. 

Other single women learned to bake sourdough. Some learned French. Some learned to make perfect little ice cubes with flowers frozen inside so they could host dinner parties for no one. But not me. I was busy becoming the most feral version of myself: a woman alone in her apartment ordering massive quantities of crab. 

At first, I tried to resist. Tried to cling to the kind of polish I had worn like armor in an office of men, the performance of composure that kept me from seeming too much, too strange, too hungry. I remember my boss, Greg, saying on a Zoom call at the beginning of lockdown, “I hope all you single people are using this time to pick up a new skill. Maybe a language or an instrument.” 

No, Greg, I’m not. All at once, I let go of the unspoken expectation to be the lady of the office and plunged headfirst into the delicate, delicious language of crab. Every Friday night after work, while the majority of our all-male team shut their laptops and wandered back down the hall to their families, I shut mine and entered a battlefield of my own making. I pulled the blinds closed. Removed my bra. Removed my pants. Stood alone in a tank top and underpants microwaving butter until it exploded all over the microwave like some divine, salty baptism. 

Maybe if there’d been other women at work, I would have joined the office-sanctioned arts-and-crafts Slack channel or the pandemic French club. Maybe I’d have learned to conjugate verbs instead of deconstruct crustaceans. With other women, I might have shared the strange, silent weight of being alone, trading jokes or small comforts in a group instead of inventing my own rituals in the dark. I am so glad that I didn’t. I learned to wield scissors like a surgeon. I learned to eat crab like it was survival. Like I was Tom Hanks in Castaway, celebrating his first hot meal of roasted crab in his cave, Wilson by his side. I had spent years making myself small at work—well-fed on meetings and deadlines, but starving for something that was only mine. I realized then that no one else was going to nurture that version of me back to life.

I bought special crab scissors. Having grown up in an Asian household, I already knew the power of kitchen scissors for meat, but I had leveled up. I could slice clean through a thick crab shell like I was defusing a bomb. My hands smelled permanently like ocean brine and melted butter. I didn’t care. 

I tried it all. Boxes arrived from Alaska, from Maine, from Maryland. I developed a loyalty to my crustaceans of choice. Dungeness for sweetness. King for drama. Soft shell for nights when I felt delicate and raw.

 The pandemic was long. There were many lonely nights. There was always more crab. 

This was not a hobby. This was a spiritual awakening. I was the kind of lonely you have to be to change. Each shell I splintered was another layer of polish breaking off, the shiny performance that once made me safe in a room full of men. But the safety was theirs, never mine. What I had left was hunger.

And still—so many stories from lockdown center around parenting struggles, and I believe every one. But single solitude was its own kind of strange, silent ache. No one saw it. No one talked about it. People made it sound like we were the lucky ones, spared the weight of homeschooling and partnerships and noise. But I was invisible. And that invisibility cracked something. I wasn’t eating crab in underpants because it was decadent. I was doing it because it was the closest thing I could find to celebration, to comfort, to proof that I could still treat myself like someone worth feeding. 

At the time, I was working full-time with men who clung to the office until the bitter end. In California, where lockdown was serious, university departments had already been urged to go remote, but mine refused until the governor’s official stay-at-home order left them no choice. The men scoffed at the threat, surfed off Campus Point Beach between meetings, and emailed impassioned essays about “returning to in-person collaboration.” 

I remember sitting in our silent office the day before we were finally sent home, looking around and wondering why no one else felt like we were on the edge of something. They wanted to go back to what felt like a deeply male version of domestication—out of the house, back with their buddies at work. But I was already gone. Already halfway to the sea. 

It all culminated the following summer when I went to Maine for a writing retreat. The final dinner was lobster. The supposed prize of the sea. I sat next to a kosher professor who nibbled politely on broccoli. Another woman beside me tried lobster for the first time. Wide-eyed. Hesitant. 

“It’s fine,” I told her, cracking my claws like I was some kind of grizzled, all-knowing seaperson, Quint from Jaws reborn. “But honestly? Crab is better.” 

They looked at me like I’d said something scandalous. And maybe I had. 

The next day, I ordered a lobster roll from a local favorite. And for old times’ sake, I got a crab roll too. No contest. 

Was it wrong to spend my pandemic lockdown sampling the crustaceans of the sea instead of bettering myself? I did not learn French. I did not take up embroidery. I did not write the next great American novel. Instead, I was a woman working hard. Hustling for crab. 

Once, in a weekly phone call with Greg, I licked a bit of crab off the end of a butter knife. The delighted slurping noise I made shocked us both. I thought I was caught until Greg urged me not to cry, reminded me we would be back in the office soon. “Totally,” I fake sniffled. 

And then I hung up, stripped back down to my crab-eating uniform, sharpened my scissors, and got back to the real work. 

Now, a few years post-pandemic, I walk past ice-packed snow crab in crowded grocery store seafood sections and feel something close to a heart tug. Lockdown was, for me, a return to whatever the hell I was supposed to be but had buried so deep down I’d forgotten—feral, free, eating crab while watching YouTube. No longer the girl at work in heeled booties and an array of buttoned-up jackets. Finally, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. As alone as a person could be, I was unashamedly myself. Just feeding the creature who needed feeding.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson