This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.
I stare at the desk and feel the pull of change. It itches and will not let me rest. I try to ignore it. I am too fatigued to get up, to do. I visited IKEA to pick up an order two days previously and followed that up the morning after with another shopping trip to pick up another online order. My body has grown sluggish, my mind blurred and half asleep. Yet, I cannot tear my eyes from the enlarger and photographic tools laid out on top of the desk.
This set-up has bothered me for months. It takes valuable desk space and I know I will not use the enlarger or cameras at hand in the near future. On occasion, I let my mind drift and toy with the idea of selling all of my film photography tools. I do not use them any longer, have not used them for months, and c annot envision myself use them for potentially years. The only reason I refuse to sell them is because I know I will not be able to acquire them again for the price I paid for them, and a part of me, the one that is less fatigued and less prone to dramatision, remembers that I love film photography, that it has permeated every layer of my life since I was old enough to be trusted with a disposable camera. The same is true of my bicycle. I no longer use it but there is too much love in it to part with it. These tools are a part of me. On better days, I allow myself to dream of returning to cycling, to photography, to long meandering pootling days atop the saddle with a camera slung across my chest, and the sun beating down on my sweating body.
This is not a better day. This is not a bad day either. I am not flirting with PEM (Post Exertional Malaise) but I am fatigued nonetheless. I see the old, the memories of all I've learned about film photography, of the community I met and still lurk at the edges of. The pain of that loss has mostly subsided, replaced by a the bittersweet tang of memories. Today, I feel neither. There is only a vast emptiness. It fills up with the itch of change. I sigh and give in. I know my mind will not let me rest until I act.
I begrundingly get out of the sofa bed and lift the enlarger and all it holds down to the floor. I turn around to slide the box of wool from under the sofa bed, the box that holds my frame loom, the paper bag that contains the small heddle for band weaving, and I pile them up on the desk.
I find the small shelving unit at the back of the room, empty it of its books and set it in the corner of the desk. I put the wool away neatly in the bottom and middle section, the top reserved for the few weaving tools I own. My frame loom fills the space the bottom of the enlarger used to claim. I have nowhere to put the enlarger but for the small chest of drawers in the bedroom so I move it there. It's impractical but it fits. I hide it behind a picture frame and a small teddy bear from long ago.
Books glare at me from the carpet of the study. I remember a couple of boxes freed up from rearranging the area under the stairs. I grab them and move things around. I move my box of negatives and printed photographs to the back of the room where the small shelving unit used to be. I pile up my darkroom and photography reference books on top and adorn them with the table lamp that light the sofa bed. In front, I slide a box full of nature books I abandonned in 2024 when my long covid diagnosis came through and I found myself locked indoors. These too I intend to return to but I need more time to let go of all the hurt and resentment I stored inside of them. Where the box of photographs used to be, I place a smaller box filled with paperwork I probably no longer need but I'm too lazy to sort through. Atop it, I display the books of the medieval reading challenge I am undertaking with my brother.
I return to the sofa bed, lie down, and look at the room around me. I am no longer surrounded with the trinkets and tools of the past, the ones I fear to approach, the ones that constantly remind me of all I have lost, all I may never regain. Instead, I see new possibilities, a new chance at creativity, an appetite for learning satisfied in different ways, the possibility of happiness.
