I scrape the car's windows and the ice resists me. I stop, let my breath slow, steady, and I place my hand flat against the crumbling white. Ice dissolves into water. In the sky, the dim outline of the brightest constellations glitter in faint join the dots patterns. I can feel my heartbeat pulse in my cooling palm. I lift it from the window, red and angry.
Mom! I cannot feel my hands! Tears flooded my cheeks as I ran towards the front of the house. I was five years old and already boasted a strong aversion to gloves. I had been playing in the snow until my skin turned raw red and numb. I still remember the pain of thawing. I still behave the same way.
I step into the car where my partner already sits and long to be on my bicycle. I have not cycle commuted for over a year, not since my referral to the long covid clinic and the understanding that my pain and fatigue was not entirely caused by rogue hormones.
I'm more stable these days. I am not sure how to communicate the change. A year ago I had lost my entire life. A year ago I was learning to mourn a past that would never return. I learned much since that fateful August that removed the possibility of an illness curable by a course of medication. I live with chronic illness now and I do not know how to explain to people that I am not healed, not cured, may never be. I can see in people's eyes this is not what they want to hear. A year ago there was compassion, interest, care. Now, people are not so keen on hearing on my ongoing illness. They want to see an upward trajectory, a trend I will never match.
I close my eyes as my partner spurs the engine on. I seek the lingering fatigue, the prickle of brain fog, and the easy dizziness. They are so familiar these days and yet they fade too. I am more stable these days. I am not healed. A week ago I crashed into post exertional malaise and now it clings to me, refuses to shift even as I rest, as I pace. I am not cured.
Christmas lights blink and shine across businesses and houses along the road to work. Colourful dots of whites and blues and greens and reds and yellows. Once I would have paused to photograph them, my breath visible in steamy puffs of moisture, my hands rigid and cold.
Wow! Wow! Wow! My niece was one year old back then and every bright light in the dark was a wonder to her. My sister and I giggled gleefully in the car's front seats unable to resist my niece's delight. Does Father Christmas exist? Huddled in a crowd at the foot of a cathedral, my nephew had turned to my sister and asked before a father Christmas started his abseil of the highest tower. I believe in the magic of Christmas, my sister had answered. Decades earlier I had asked the same question to my mother and received an equally cryptic answer.
We pull in the parking lot by the two imposing grey warehouses of work. K's car glistens under the tentative brightness of the day. A year and a month ago, I wriggled out of my tent and stood shivering in an empty field where every blade of grass glistened under ice. Horses shuffled on the other side of the fence. I looked to the sky, eyes full of wonder and hope for the year to come, for the year that was.