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.
Anxiety pools in corners of my skin. I do not detect it as easily as I did a week ago but I know it lingers. I do not think it ever truly leaves. I have been good. I have cut down my screen time to almost zero past working hours. I have been filling the pages of my journal with my feelings, my thoughts, my gratitudes. I have been careful to nourish my body properly, to swallow the supplements my partner lays out for me in the morning. I have gone to sleep early with a book or a crossword puzzle to soothe my mind. It works. It always does.
I know the next step is to expand my range, leave the house. I want to sit in the garden but it has become, in part, an area that triggers my anxiety. Instead of seeing the growth and the life, I see all the little jobs I cannot do, the ones that endlessly pile up and make me hyperventilate. So I grab a book, I grab my camping chair, and I leave by the front door on the new electric scooter. It's a strange mode of transportation, one that moves my body through space as I remain entirely static save for a flick of the wrist to control the speed. I begrudgingly purchased it in a too good to pass up sale and I've been attempting to learn it, to grow familiarity and attachment to it. If I could kick and feel the exertion of my body, I have no doubt it would be easier. I can do it but I should not do it. Fatigue clings so easily to me, I do not need to call its presence. I roll through quiet streets and the closest park to home. A few children still play in the spiderweb and swings. A man practices a tai-chi routine. Teenagers hang about by the sport equipment I never see in use. I roll through the car park and cross the road into the next park along. The paths are rough and untarmacked but I know a loop that is fine for the large wheels of this scooter. I follow it easily, glide with no power down a low incline that leads to the bridge over the nameless brook.
I hop off the platform and walk through the supple grass still strong from rain and cloud cover. I settle beyond the old almost horizontal white willow, to the edge of a cut path. I set up the chair with my back to the brook, invisible behind a barrier of elderberry and hawthorn bushes. I face the setting sun, still high in the sky but lowering fast. In the north, the railway track is closed to trains. A giant yellow claw whirrs and clangs at the rails while folks in bright orange hi-vis walk alongside it.
I breathe in the damp air coming from the brook, fuelled by the recent rains. I can hear the unfamiliar voice of song thrush twined with the beloved back and forth of territorial blackbirds. Chiffchaff and wrens join in too. Pigeons coo in the distance, low and slow, in an echo of all of my childhood summers. I seek swallows as I know I will not find them. They do not reside in the midst of bricks houses stuck to one another and glistening cars that eat the pavements.
Tentatively I slide Is a River Alive? by Robert McFarlane out of the my bag. I received it a few weeks earlier and up until now, I have been enable to open it. The words danced on the page and refused to fall in a neat readable order. I open the first page and I read. My brain does not lock access to words today. I read. I turn the page and I read some more. I am not swimming in fog, neither do I feel the early warning signs for it. I turn another page and I carry on reading. I take regular breaks to look at the sky and watch the white clovers, ryegrass and other grasses I do not yet know how to name sway in a light breeze.
A dozen or so flies swirl above my head. I cannot hear them under the melodies of birds. Two magpies fly across the unmowed field, their shape outlined by the setting sun gradually engulfed by clouds. I choke on my own breath and feel the tingle of tears at the edge of my eyes. I refuse to let them fall. These are not sad tears, I know this, but I have cried far too much over the last year. I swallow back my breath and return to the book.
People walk by and utter mumbled greetings I can barely hear, their voices clear and loud only to order their dogs to stay away from me. I would happily greet them. A young couple huddle close as their shuffle on the long diagonal that streaks through the grass. A man on a bicycle rolls silently through after them and I remember a kingfisher from the time I did not know I was sick. I was sitting at the edge of this brook, not in this spot but a little further. That other spot was devoid of tall waning burnt nettles and bright veiny carpeting ivy. I had settled on the hard dusty ground, my body still able to crouch this low with no consequences upon rising. The bird had come in a flash of blue so fast I thought I had dreamt it. Only I had not. It returned just as fast and was gone in a sneeze.
I cannot see any kingfishers today with my back to the brook. It is okay. I can return later to that other spot. Now the time is for reading and watching the sun fall in the sky, kiss the tip of the sloe berry bushes on the other side of the park. My skin shivers a little as warmth leeches from the air but it is not truly cool. The air is thick with pollens that make my partner sneeze and cough. It is heavy with the promise of heat to come and I am glad the solstice is on the way, the longest days soon over.
