I have many things that I could/need to do but fatigue and lethargy are winning the battle. This one sentence have sat here for days, waiting for me to get my shit together. I’m overcome by lassitude. I’m here but I can’t count on my words. It seems they and this space have failed me. They once gave me voice and ease. Can they rescue and resuscitate me? I guess this is a depression of some sort. The time is right for it. I wonder if this is our new reality or am I in this dream by myself?

I watched a video by Laurie Wagner of Writing Wildly last night. She read from her writing of ‘when the virus came’ – what she was doing. Those 4 words stirred a mixed of emotions and memories within me. They were all blended and whipped into I know not what. I did have a sense that I’ve felt the virus long before it showed up as the coronavirus pandemic. What am I suppose to do with all that now?

It is Saturday morning. Usually it’s my swim morning but there’s no more usually. I can’t remember the last time I swam. It is April 18th. The temperature is finally above 0. It is the coolest and wettest April in a long while. The snow is still melting. Puddles everywhere. Behind our garage in the back alley, it is a lake. Everything is a mess. I hear the wind howling through the spruce trees.

When the virus came, I was in the midst of dealing with my mother’s shingles virus. I remembered it started on a Saturday morning, February 8th. She phoned. It is not a good sign when my mother phones in the morning. Could I take her to the mediclinic. Her head hurts so much. It was also the beginning of the coronavirus but not here yet.  No quarantine or social distancing. But we were asked if we had travelled to China recently or had visitors from China. We were such innocents then. We got a diagnosis. We got a prescription.

Things did not progress smoothly. The province declared a state of emergency. Everything shut down. My father became a blob in my mother’s left eye. A telephone doctor’s appointment followed by an office visit, followed by a visit to the eye center at the hospital. Stress and anxiety became a new way of living. Necessity moved me, step by step. It was like the domino effect. We did pull through, suffering the pain and side effects of everything, breathing through our N95 masks. My father’s face had features and trees had branches again in my mother’s eye.

I’m grateful that necesssity has passed. The stress and anxiety have lessened. We have flattened the curve. I am also somewhat flat, unable to rally my oomph. The clutters sits and the dust gathers. My body gives half hearted attempts at moving. If not for Sheba, I would not go for walks. Dang everything! Gravity is heavy. Uncertainty is weighty. Anxiety still lives. My body remembers, shivers with it. I will make myself another cup of tea.