Covid .
You meet someone who’s got it or is getting over it, then you get it and then the people you live with get it, and then you think you get over it but it returns to the start with a new variation of the old illness and everyone gets sick again..
We’re all sick, or if we’re not sick we are recovering from being sick, or we are about to get sick..
As for me, after two years of no winter flu, I am hovering between the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. My body can’t decide which way to go. It’s mostly sick but I can still buy my own groceries, which is the metric of whether you are sick or not – can you shop for your own chicken soup .
I keep a watch on my symptoms as I did once with a sourdough starter in 2020, during my year of perfect health. Is the sickness growing? What form is it taking? What is the consistency of my phlegm? What are my lymph nodes trying to tell me? Will the ride be gnarly and or will it be mild and soporific? Will it be one of those sicknesses where you sleep a lot, or will it be one where you can’t sleep at all? Will my ears start to ache? Will I google “head transplant”? Or will it go away overnight if I go to bed at 6pm .
That’s the thing about sickness, it’s unpredictable almost moment to moment. It can trick you into thinking you are getting better, that you are in the last days of it, when suddenly one day you wake up and you are so much worse..
This flu season feels more like a communal event .