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.
My partner's energy wanes as the days since our return from France tick by. A virus has settled inside of her but we do not yet know this, not on the Sunday when she drives me to the lake.
I step into the water gingerly, splash my body about in a pretence to get used to the cold before I launch in. Instantly my skin prickles and tingles in a very familiar way, but the water is not so cold these days. The temperature flirts with double digits (Celsius) and I am comfortable. I swim and swim and swim. I am almost warm by the time I get out of the water. Briefly I wonder if this is a sign that I am getting too cold, one of those weird body response that sends the wrong message, but when I get out I am okay. My core's temperature keeps dropping after I am dressed but this is normal and I seek this deep cool in my chest. It soothes every single part of me, deeply relaxes me for reasons I scientifically understand but mentally do not.
We drive back home and I eat breakfast. We settle into a Sunday rhythm of doing not much.
By the afternoon my partner is wiped out and it falls on me to do all the house chores. I am glad to have recovered a little from France and to know I will be able to work from home for the first couple of days back to work.
My partner retires to the bedroom. I dig my sleeping bag out of storage and transform the sofa in the study into a bed. It has been a long time since we have had to separate like this due to illness but the gestures are somehow still known, still familiar from the days of lockdown and fear.
I am not afraid of illness but there is no denying that my body has changed since long covid settled within me. Illnesses have a tendency to linger now, to hammer me down and take their time to go. Just as they do with my partner.
The following days we settle into the dance of illness, of masks and open windows when we have to be in the same room, of my partner resting and me doing, of working at the laptop to the rhythm of cups of tea and deleted e-mails.
I remain healthy. Incredibly. Strangely. I suspect that by now I too should have fallen sick and yet I have not.
On Tuesday, after work a friend picks me up from my home and we go to the lake. We swim together in a water that feels a little colder than on Sunday even though it isn't. I am thankful for the hold of it, for the weeds that have started to grow and spread, the weeds that catch in the thick neoprene of my gloves. I step out and watch the sun turn the trees golden as my friend disappear into the sauna.
I breathe in deeply and exhale a sigh of contentment that the breeze carries away. My body shivers and I let it.