So here we are then.
I do not want it but it settles in nonetheless, the diagnosis of long covid.
The magic of the iron pills only lasted for the duration of the packet. I thought I was in the clear, all that was left the known pain of my hormones. Life as I knew it had returned so I booked the Caledonian Sleeper to pootle about in the wind and rain and sun of the Western Scottish isles atop my saddle for a couple of weeks. Except that on my return home, I found myself broken. Again.
The fatigue had returned, pervasive and bringing along with it pain, unsteadiness, and a sea of fog. Here and there, a good day would happen in which I glimpsed life as it used to be. And all the while, I waited for medical appointments, blood tests, and plunged back into illness, into disability and fear.
After all the tests, after all the phone calls, my GP finally wrote the referral to the long covid clinic. A video call was set up and the reality of my health laid bare to me.
'It must be hard,' the lady on the screen says. She has listened, taken notes, prompted me, and finally asked me how I am coping. Not well.
'Yeah, it's been...' I choke in the silence of the house and I cry, try not to sob as the weight of anxiety and sorrow grips my heart. I can no longer pretend that I am fine, that I will be fine if I rest another month or two. My present is hard.
I retreat within myself, leave the life I once knew to live, learn the life that I have now, and in the empty mist of brain fog, fatigue, and pain, I seek a life ahead, reshaped, reimagined.
I begin to walk when I can, follow the old lockdown routes, the short ones. I rekindle connections to kin that had receded in the background. I catch-up with the oaks and the willows and the brambles and the hazels and the sycamores and the gaps where ashes used to be. I meet the robins and blackbirds and sparrows and foxes and magpies and crows and mice and bats I had not greeted in a while, not the ones of my local paths anyway. I listen to the brooks and watch them rise and fall, carry the water for the ducks and geese and kingfishers and herons and dragonflies. I sit by the fire pit in the garden and lose myself in the dancing embers in the dark metal bowl. And there, hands shaking, I pick up a pen and write. I reach for my phone and remember the beauty and peace of freezing a transient image of the joy and stillness of everyday life. The insects I still cannot name chirp at nightfall and unexpectedly I find solace in late night BBC3 radio. My chest swells with the strings, the ambient drones, the recording of far away seas. I cry. I keep on crying until there if nothing left to cry.
Weeks later, I am sitting on the only bench of the park. My legs throb with the walk that carried me here. The sycamore drops a leaf at my foot and I pick it up even if it means a bout of dizziness for a moment or two. My head swims with the noise of traffic. I pretend it's a distant body of water lapping a shore. I watch the red light of the railway illuminate the fading green of dusk, and I dare to imagine a future in which I am happy, in which the loops of my parks and local nature reserve are as big as the miles of my bicycle. I still dream of cycle touring in Japan, of riding the Trans-Siberian railway to get there. I dream of the nearer future too, of next autumn sitting at cafés in Florence, taking a long rest and drinking I don't know what (strong caffeine banished from my life) but where I live and take in art and learn about the birds and trees of the mediterranean climate, where I write and photograph, where I return to sound and the magic held within.
My body cannot move the way it used to and neither can my mind, but that is okay, for stories and the voices of the Earth have long taught me that as cliché as it is, all endings and beginnings too. All endings are beginnings too.