There’s no vaccine for the kind of Corona in me. My lungs, brain, blood and muscles have not (yet) been occupied by 19. But all the same, I carry it closely wherever I go. I am not asymptomatic (as best as I can tell). I am diligent with my mask-wearing and ernest in my exploration of that vast region called the great indoors. For weeks on end I only leave the house to do a quick grocery shop. My social interactions are outside and at a “safe” distance. Being ill is not about the possibility of being asymptomatic. Rather, it is about my reckoning with the awareness that I too am sick from COVID. I’ve been psychologically rearranged by it, altered by it. We haven’t discussed these emotional affects as an infection. Perhaps some words should be saved for factual use. Yet my illness, your illness, goes misnamed or unnoted or missed. It isn’t only loneliness, though it involves that. It isn’t only isolation, though it begins with it. It’s not only being starved of art and music, even as I am. The infection takes hold of me in my sunroom and bedroom, at my desk and in front of the television. Home itself, as an idea and a space has been pressed into service for all I miss—bars, restaurants, libraries, coffee houses, yoga studios, and movie theatres. This sense of being unwell happens at home; home becomes the infection source and its treatment center, the source of feeling trapped and the only place to escape to. We stay inside to avoid 19 and inside becomes the space of my emotional unwellness and where it unfolds, spreads, redoubles, mutates.
I stay home because I am 59 and don’t want to spread anything to my partner who is 61. I stay home because I work from home. I stay home because I am a writer and an introvert. I weigh my risks carefully. I weed risks out. I play the long game. I am unvaccinated and most likely won’t be for months and months. There isn’t a treatment for what I have. I keep digging deeper in myself to learn from this Kali-inspired destruction of my former way of being, way of living. On good days, I am in the COVID monastery, open to what “letting go of A, B, C, D, E” brings. Who am I without dinners out, parties with friends, dark bars, live music, long weekends spent indoors with family as it snows. On sick days, days like today, I am filled with COVID, without a fever or virus or lung congestion or mental fog. I am too awake and too aware of how much my sense of time and of the future has fallen away. Like a sick person, I can only think of immediate remedies. When will this end? When will I feel better? When can I go out again?
