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.
'Goodbye sunshine!' I yell to the air from the open garden door. The sun has melted past the distant row of houses and darkness gradually settles over the garden.
'Welcome back shorter days! Soon the return of colder days!' The wind buffets my words and slams them against the hot bricks of the house.
I roll my feet back and forth, suppressing the urge to bounce. This is not the time to accelerate my heart beat too much and send my body crashing into fatigue, not now that the hardest part of the year is past.
It is the 21st of June and for the first time, I have refused to celebrate the day.
The summer solstice never used to mark the mellow return of the lengthening nights. This was simply a by-product of it. Instead, the solstice was a marker of summer adventures, long days in the saddle, nights in the tent, paddles in rivers. For years, I built a ritual to go cycle touring and wild camping the week-end of/after the solstice.
When my body changed under the weight of long covid, I asked my partner to drive me to a nearby estuary town to watch the sun disappear behind the low hills of southern Wales. This year, I did none of this. The thought of the solstice filled my mouth with bile. I wanted the day gone.
So I kept to my plans to go to Bath, to meet up with friends, to resolutely ignore the significance of the day. Still, the date nudged at my mind as I ignored social media and my friends celebrations. I attempted to push my anger down but it refused to be ignored. Sitting in a park, watching the dance of clouds and flights of birds, I allowed it to spread though my being.
It flowed along my veins, tingled in my fingertips, pooled in my heavy pinched legs, and seeped out of my brain. And then, it was gone, patterns of sadness etched where the anger had been. Spring had destroyed me. What was once a joyous season of blossoming and burgeoning life had transformed into a gnawing anxiety and a burden of fatigue and brain fog. I crashed and crashed as my body responded to the call of life. I did not know how to navigate the urge to do, to walk, to cycle, to exit the burrow of the study where I lived for all of winter. I still do not know how. This is past. Now is summertime.
I know that the study is still where I need to live. I am more easily allowed in the gardens and local parks as the weather doesn't drench me quite so often, and the wind doesn't bite me quite so fiercely. My boundaries need to remain firm. I have to remain anchored to my static life.
The day after the solstice, I picked up my drop spindle. I had not touched it since the end of May and the trip that brought to life all of my anxiety. I spun and spun and spun as tennis played on the television and my partner sat next to me on the sofa. The following day, I dragged my new unused loom from below the sofa bed and brushed the dust aside. I opened the instruction booklet, ignored it, and dipped into my memories of the weaving course I had attended in early May. I weaved fabric in a repetitive rhythm that calmed my mind. In the evening, I returned to the drop spindle as tennis still played on the television.
I watched the yellow ball across the screen, the green grass not yet turned to parched earth by the feet of players across the baseline. The fibre broke repeatedly as my attention waned but I did not mind. My hands were busy, my brain was still from the repetitive movements, from the back and forth of the ball and the low droning hum of the television set to almost mute. It hit me then that my body was replicating the movements I miss so much, the one that endlessly soothe me and keep anxiety at bay. Instead of the turn of my legs on a bicycle, instead of the back and forth of walking, I am using my upper body. My arms move in unfamiliar movements somehow intimately known. Repetition and soft focus stop my brain from spiralling, reminds my body to breathe, to slow, to be. I knew then that summer is going to be okay. I can lose myself in the weave of time and craft. Not a bicycle, not the stride of my legs, but the flick of my hands, the pull of my arms, the back and forth of the weaving shuttle.
