When you feel a cold coming on, you know it’s a cold. It’s something you recognise, identifiable, familiar. When covid strikes, you don’t know what it is or what it’s going to do. It’s foreign, unknown, new, frightening. An alien invasion. It strikes with intention. It’s on a mission.
It comes with its own dark intelligence. It seeks out areas of past trauma, where fear still resides, and stirs up old pains. It goes straight to my lower back and triggers pain where there’s been none for 13 years. It goes straight to my stomach and creates nausea and vomiting reminiscent only of morning sickness 23 years ago.
Spaces open up between listening and hearing, looking and understanding, eating and tasting.
It settles in. It gives me headaches, sweats, sneezes and a runny nose. Yet all still uncomfortably alien. Sinister. I’m somewhat delirious. In a heightened state. By Day 3 I’ve settled in too. This is covid then. But it was just getting established.
I wake Day 4 with a pain in my chest. In the centre of my being. It has found its way to the essence of my existence. To the heart of me. To my core.
The pain takes hold. I see it as a dark cloud. Pure evil. It turns its full force on me. It’s here for my soul. To extinguish the light.
I pray.
On a metaphysical level a great battle wages. I watch. I see the abyss.
I see why so many people have died. It is too hard a fight. I weep.
I wept and prayed.
By afternoon it is over. Defeated. I am triumphant. Euphoric.
Day 5 I wake with a burning headache. I feel it attack my brain. It’s eating my brain. FFFUUUCCKKK OOOFFFF. By evening it has taken taste and smell.
Day 6 I am sunk in depression. Losing smell is unexpectedly distressing. Disorientating. Taste is only necessary when you are eating, but we use smell to navigate every second of the day. We use smell to know who we are.
Or maybe I am just crashing after such a sudden and intense experience.
I am fortunate – smell and taste return by Day 7.
I was much more than fortunate.
I was off work two weeks. Needed time to come back to earth. To ease back into life. To readjust. A factory reset. Renewal.