Well, it finally found me. A little over four years since Covid came into the world Covid came to me. On Monday evening I started feeling a little iffy, or icky, or punky and thought, hm. I think when I wake up tomorrow morning, I'm going to be sick. Indeed I was sick when I woke up, but it wasn't the morning but the middle of the night, about four hours after I went to sleep. I woke up with a fever, sweating. I got up drank a bottle of Gatorade, and then some water, went back to bed where I tossed and turned until about 10AM the next day. At that point I took my temperature, ate some fruit, and went back to bed, where I stayed the rest of the day, getting up in the evening to order some food, watch an episode of Shogun, play a single game Catan, and then back to bed where I stayed for another twelve or so hours sort of sleeping, sort of not sleeping, reading, and drifting to and fro amongst sweaty half thoughts and fever dreams. My fever peaked somewhere around 39.5 °C, or 103 °F when I had the wherewithal to sit up and take note. I took a Covid test in that first morning but it came up negative.
The second day was a similar experience of debilitating all day fever, though I went into the day hopefully, thinking that I had the flu and that it would tail off, which it kind of did. A little. I had a meeting over Zoom that evening with some folks back in the States and I didn't tell them I was sick, not wanting to derail the conversation. Anyway, eventually I was sweating profusely, wiping my brow and neck and sneaking in sips of orange juice. Immediately afterward I drank a dose and a half of Nyquil and returned to bed.
It wasn't until the third day that the fever started to lift such that I could look at a computer screen well enough to send out a few necessary emails. This was also the day, later in the afternoon, that I took another Covid test to find out that yes, in fact, this is Covid. That night I laid in my bed reading terrifying stories about long Covid and how Covid changes the brain and how long it takes for it to typically pass. By the fourth day (and I am writing in the fifth), all of the initial symptoms of fever had mostly disappeared and I started to feel like myself again. Today I went running and feel ok but am still testing positive, however faint the line on the little plastic rectangle that diagnoses me. Yesterday I had a complete loss of smell and taste but already, today, it's coming back a bit. I think. I imagine. I still feel a bit achy and have slight amount of congestion but am holding out hope for a negative diagnosis by tomorrow morning such that I can have 24-hour head start to begin my last seven-week course of the academic year in person. With a mask on of course.
**
To finally get Covid comes as a kind of relief. Ah, I can say. This is what it's like. Covid. Uh Hm. Of course. Of course, this is also not what it's like, the strain of Covid that finally found me, according to the China CDC (as found in another source that I will not link to here but you can google it if you want to know more), is the JN.1 variant of the Omicron variant. So there you have it. Covid, formerly known as Covid-19 or Coronavirus, as I called it back in 2020 when I started to write about it, has come a long way. I'm lucky to not have gotten it when it was younger and more powerful. Like me these days, it's a little bit slower and not as effective. That said, that was a nasty ass fever and though I had gotten a bit lax on the vaccinations, my last one coming in May of 2022, in the future I'm definitely going to get some Covid booster shots. And a flu shot too while I'm at it. Like that Foreigner song I Want to Know What Love Is, except replace love with not feeling sick as hell and completely screwing up this week long break that I had plans for. But as I said, it could have been worse and hopefully the faint lines on the Covid tests are not followed by a disappointing recursion or relapse, but a seamless fade into normalcy.
To finally get Covid has also triggered reflection, thinking about all the time and energy that I spent trying not to get Covid. I thought about the early days of running out of China with Jo and Dave, of running back the US, to Indiana and Cloud, to Wisconsin and my parents, and then back to China. I thought about those early days of trying to live, to teach online, holding my breath in elevators, or dosing my hands in sanitizer after grocery shopping. I don't feel silly or ashamed for any of that, but amazed at our heightened sense of focus and purpose and how the world shrank so quickly in the enactment of ritual, a new normal and then some. And masks. And gloves. How clear some of those memories are of everyday life, the radical uncertainty that propelled us: the beach house in Australia, the student apartments in Indiana, the yellow house in the dead of Winter and the empty flat at the start of Spring. Hand sanitizer in the glove box or the door pocket, and there were crumpled masks in all my pockets. And yours. And Zoom. And Fucking Zoom.
I remember watching Chris Cuomo and his brother, the governor, go on in their reassuring explanatory prose. I remember prepping for the faculty meetings over Zoom on a stranger's formica kitchen counter, trying to figure out how we were going to keep things going, Kathy's assertion that of course, we'd do that. I remember drinking a flat white for the first time on the beach of Coolangatta, two hours after getting off the plane from Hong Kong. Such a beautiful warm day, and the ocean, the three of us still humming with the excitement of our escape. I remember sitting with Jake and Mary-Lou on the back patio of their sweet little house and the zoo keeper who sold me medicine. I remember Indiana, and shopping at Pay Less as if our lives depended on it, cooking, and joking around in the kitchen. We were lucky to have one another. I remember going over to Rachelle and Aaron's tiny house of dogs to watch movies and I remember the brightly lit second floor flat and the brilliantly quiet deadbolt of the student apartment door, trying to close it as quietly as possible when I would sneak out for a cigarette. I remember Zooming with my buddies and playing Catan online with my nephews, sprawled on the sectional couch in the yellow house. Long late winter afternoons and teaching over Zoom in the evenings. AirBnB. Every day there would be more conflicting news, more uncertainty, more predictions, more cancellations, and more instructions. At the same time, everyday was a little bit easier as we figured out how to live like this. Every day that first half of year Covid was mind bending, from January to June, but I don't exactly remember the rest.
**
It took a minute to get back into China where in October of 2020 I endured a month long quarantine. I can remember this but don't. There was nothing interesting about it but the metaphor of the quarantine event itself as the perfect birth canal into the police state that was Covid era China, RIP December 2023. Please show your health code in the name of peace. And it was for awhile, the glory days of 2021 China, while the rest of the world struggled, China relaxed, and vice versa in 2022. The first thing my mother asked me when I told her I had Covid the other day was, are you okay? Did they lock you up? They don't do that anymore here mom, I reassured her. But anyway, here we are, out of the soft focus of nostalgia and back into the political reality of international such and such. Which is where Covid is destined to go, unremembered as an unprecedented time of radical change but a political talking point to distract us from how deeply transformative the past four years have been. Many had someone who died in the most horrible ways possible, alone and afraid in a soulless hospital; others, like myself, splintered into anti-social habit patterns of various forms of tech addiction, distrust, and loneliness: there wasn't enough touch to go around and the CDC would rather we not anyway. Schools, at least in States, went online and that seemed to have been a mistake, memories of my nephews, young boys barely able to punch the buttons on the simplest videogame sitting at their grandma's kitchen table, tasked with Zooming into class on laptop computers. I don't get it. I mean, I get it. I mean, I don't think anyone needs me to write a laundry list of terrible things that Covid hath wrought.
But from my perspective, Covid has taught me a lot. For example, I know what a spike protein looks like. I know that airlines have a lot of regulations. I know that Anthony Fauci is well spoken, though after awhile it seemed like he was always saying the same thing. I know how quickly people like me, white collar and educated, can adapt to living indoors and through screens. And I find it alarming how quickly our preferences can change. I don't know if this is real, but it's a rare occasion that I have a random conversation with a person I didn't previously know. I swear it used to happen all the time. I can't figure out if it's just me or "them," or some kind of unstudied social convention that has mutated, like Delta or Omicron. Or social media. Or getting older. Or being lonely and unhappy. It's hard to say. And it's hard to separate any of this from itself, Covid, Trump, China, The Internet, Me, You, etc. All of it, at the same time, and incredibly loud. Meanwhile, it feels like I am standing here with an expired firework in my hand. Or maybe a melted popsicle. Or a cigarette that burnt out quite a while ago and lost in thought I forgot that I was holding it in my hand. I can't speak for anyone else, but I've learned a lot from the experience of Covid. What exactly, and however, I don't know.
There's the facts and the knowledge about how to protect myself from this abstract concept of Covid-19, and then there's all the ways that I've been primed and pumped full of fear over these years to not do this or not do that; all the tiny little habits of mind that I have learned to protect myself with, be it ideologically, biologically, professionally, or personally. By the time I got Covid it wasn't a thing any more, which to me means that it was never about Covid itself, its virus-ness, but always about the institutions and systems and data banks and markets and politics and countries and regulations that Covid infected. All of this too large and immense for any of us to understand yet the only language I have to understand why any of this happened is in the language of these faceless machines. But don't get me wrong: I'm not mad. If you give you me a vaccine I'll take it. If you tell me to lock down I'll do it. And if I need a health code to enter, just say so. They tell us we can't go back and I believe them. In fact, I agree with them. Pre-Covid is as unimaginable as Covid was as imaginable pre-Covid. Not the imagination of science-fiction pandemic politics, which I think were adequately dreamed of, but how the every day has changed, the paranoia and the hesitation and dissolution of community. What happened during Covid is already an overgrown ruin of a memory, due for excavation. I offer this shovel full of dirt.
