Oh, COVID-19… how I hate it. Not because it has basically destroyed any semblance of an economy, or that it has revealed the true nature of every American over having to wear a mask, or how it has trapped all of us inside our homes with our insufferable families. No. It is because it has killed conversations. I am so over discussing it in passing or at length with anyone I may come into contact with. It’s a worn out topic that, frankly, no one has anything new to offer, and at this point we all sound like broken records. (Emphasis on the all, in that statement.)

The thing that humbles me when I start to feel the rage rising in me, in regards to Covid, is that every person in the world feels my pain. Granted we all experience it at different levels, but each of us has had shared moments.

I had written about that, some months back (the beautiful thing about the “Covid Experience” is it also kills any sense of or concept of lived time), and here I am to continue it. However, since then I, my mother, and my husband have contracted the potentially deadly disease.

Out of the three of us, each experience was very different. Even my own experience was so convoluted and bizarre it was almost like the sickness itself was trying to find out what it wanted to do.

Covid Cell 1: “Should we attack the lungs today?”

Covid Cell 2: “No. I hear the toes are really popping off though.”

My husband had the luxury of sleeping for four straight days. That isn’t hyperbole. He literally slept, morning to night, through his illness. I on the other-hand continued to work from home. Where each day was something entirely different.

The first day was full body aches with a stuffy nose (with no mucus), the next it decided to cause crazy pains at the back of my legs, the following it was just pain in my upper back, and then toward the end I just had a splitting headache that refused to go away. I never once experienced a fever, though one night I had the chills while sleeping, and a cough wasn’t really a factor in my illness that I find it odd we use these two things as bars for whether we have the disease or not.

However, I say that about a cough but it is because of that, that I even assumed my mother had contracted it from me.

I was hoping she hadn’t. It turned out that the day I started to feel some building symptoms, that my mother told me she needed to go to the emergency room. Her stomach was hurting her. As it turned out (like the last time I took her for the same thing) was that she had a UTI. Her urgency was expected but overall irritating because why then? And my husband couldn’t take her because he was for sure sick, and her caretaker couldn’t because I had her insurance information. So, it had to be me. I wore a mask the entire time I was with her and she still got it. And she survived.

The first thing my husband said when I told him she tested positive was, “Your mother is a horse.” And immediately following his statement was her caretaker who opined, “Your mother would have survived the black plague.”

It’s odd to me that my mother’s body is so healthy. She’s been overweight for all of my life, and she doesn’t have high blood pressure, heart disease, or diabetes. Nope. Her health is incredible, it’s just her brain that sucks. So it’s fitting that old age or external diseases wouldn’t be the things to potentially take her life; no, it has to be her own mind that ends it all. Strange.

Miraculously, the boyfriend didn’t get it. I don’t know how. He was hanging out in the house the first day the husband was sick. He did get sick, but his test came back negative.

I would think (and hope) that surviving something that could very well have killed me would spark some sort of urgency to finish my novel. Yet, here I am lacking any will to even peruse what I have finished. It sucks.

I have ultimately chocked it up to the belief I now feel, that there is no future. Like, I do believe life will march on. It will. It has for centuries. It will just look so very different once this is all over, if it ever ends. And in this brand new age, will my story even matter?

So, instead of writing about the new route I have decided to take in regards to my book (making it a limited serial audiobook podcast) I spent the entire post talking about Covid-19.

I told you… I hate what it’s done to conversations. And now blog posts.