may, the sickest month
last year i got into vlogging as a fun memory-keeping experiment. i find it so comforting to watch other people’s vlogs, and also to look back at what i did, what was happening that season. i even made a youtube channel. then, in may, i got covid and that all unraveled. my creative energy dried up. somehow i haven’t found my way back again, though i’d like to, or at least slip into something else. but now i’m sitting here because it’s may again and while i am not sick (for now!) (except for spring allergies), j is (today he said “i’m just tired of being sick!” while reaching for the next round of cold meds), so this household is staying very indoors. i sat at the piano and lost my patience for trying to write more bars of a song. i listened to the neighbors talking outside, children playing, tires rolling over asphalt, distant planes. i picked tufts off the tips of miso’s shedding ears. i found these scraps i wrote last year about being sick:
5/22/24
well, we finally got covid, and while j seems mostly recovered, i am deep in it (day 5 of symptoms). i have been cataloguing my various symptoms hoping that in my documentation that i will see some slivers of progress despite that the experience is so different for everyone. so far it has just been depressing; i woke up today and cried, feeling so trapped, unable to leave the house, take a walk, make a cocktail, or even taste anything (partial loss of smell and taste has led to an almost total loss; sometimes i can feel a faint cloud of something-or-other but it’s mostly flat, so very flat; do i even remember what things taste like?), and yet i also feel like i am complaining about tepid bathwater. at least, à la lydia davis, now that i have covid, i can say with certainty that i have never had it before.
one of the things i miss the most is pressing my face into miso’s fur for her sweet corn puffs smell; it’s always been so comforting, but now it’s not there. she is still, of course, extremely fluffy and soft, but it’s not the same.
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now i’m on day 10, testing negative, or basically negative, like clockwork, even though it felt so endless before. i still feel worn down, a level of uncomfortable all the time. phlegmatic. the other day i realized one of my meds was actually giving me nausea, so i felt sicker. despite all my other creature comforts — my heating pad. the power went out today for a brief stretch, the mild inconvenience of a yoga class interrupted on my ipad. my stupid little life during a genocide.
so much sensation, yet also so much dampened. my throat is dry, my nose is clogged, my lungs probably inflamed. my ears itch, full of fluid when i wiggle my jaw. a pressure in my face. i don’t smell very much at all. some tension around my ribs. cold when i breathe through my mouth. the warmth of my toes tucked into the blanket, pressed against the cotton sheet. the piano melodies that j is looping upstairs, the drone of a bass line that vibrates through the floor and off the walls. the dim fairy lights above my head. the croissant of miso sleeping nearby. the wetness when i blink.
sick, i look at people who are not sick and wonder how they move through the world.