solitary covering

so strange how my human body has a timer. at a certain week every month, as if something has clicked into place, i am suddenly pulled with anxiety and depression. not myself, but still trapped in myself. it could be coincidental, but i want to believe it’s the hormones, the color of the pill that i crack out and swallow. hormonally, does this moment of my mental state, the movement of my brain, match-up with when i’m most wanting to write? (have i written this question before…) the body needs some place to go. i feel like i’m leaking out of myself, fizzing over the top. maybe the pill isn’t worth it anymore? but it’s only a day or two every month, that’s not so bad. i remember last month, the only thing that could calm my mind, late at night spiraling, was watching a documentary about a boogie-man and abandoned mental hospitals. distract myself by entering a worse place, remembering other terrible places besides my head, my room.

the tracking of my body’s emotional and physical shifting has been a huge part of the last couple weeks, during and after recovering from covid. what sensation of the illness is left? my right foot sometimes feels a bit numb, and my right calf tenses up like a charley horse. this is a symptom at the bottom of the list: muscle soreness, tingling. maybe my nose still feels a little dry. at the end of the day, my head can get dizzy. the impact of a series of actions. i was lucky — i didn’t get very sick, sometimes i doubted if i even had covid at all. but the red letters “positive” on the test got sent out to the missouri department of health, and there’s my little number on the + when u google cases rising. h and m had totally different experiences — they stayed in bed all day, they had headaches, bad congestion, couldn’t breathe, got tired walking up and down the stairs. so sick, for over a week. i want to say i am relieved i wasn’t that sick, but i mostly feel guilty and bewildered. those two feelings — guilt and bewilderment — sum it up.

if there seems to be a clear time of every month when i feel my darkest self, maybe that’s okay. at least there is a warning, a reason, predicted from my prescription drug and/or my body shedding its hole (sorry). but i have no clue how we got covid, or when, who, why. nothing. it’s an invisible particle in the air — the word “aerosol” also bewilders me. where could it have come from? anywhere anywhere.

a summer storm is rolling in now as i write this at my desk. i’m listening to arthur russell live recording on youtube. there’s the part of the song where his voice fades out, you don’t know if he’s about to cough or sneeze or cry. the clouds look dark and bubbling over the houses, with blips of brightness and blue sky, a surprise bit of rain coming. our house is taller than the adjacent five houses down the block, and i’m on the second-floor, so i look over their roofs lined with brick and terracotta tile. lined with cable satellites. who still watches cable. lined with chimneys. the dark corsage of a tree. everything rolls straight ahead like a field, a valley of boxes that cover people’s lives, my vision from writing.

my room is like that, a box that covers my life. i think about the word “recovering” — does the word relate to shelter? when i woke up one morning in the early sun during isolation, i looked out the window by my bed and locked in with the camper-bus permanently parked in my neighbor’s backyard. i locked in with the scraggly dry vines that hang from the telephone wires like extra wires that got too knotted up. in the backyard next to ours, the white familiar forms of plastic pins from a kid’s outdoor bowling game. they look like sprawled doll legs on the sidewalk. the alley connects all of this like a grid. it’s an old alley made out of bricks, not covered with asphalt like most streets in st. louis. the old man who owns the camper-bus takes care of the alley. sometimes i’ll look out the window and see him, too — husky white beard with a tucked-in shirt over his old-dude belly, sweeping up the leaves and trash in the alley, like the alley is his prized possession. i once overhead him talking to some neighborhood kids taking out the trash for their house, warning them about a hornet’s nest in the dumpster — be careful, i got stung twelve times, he said. m says he’s a talker, be careful or he’ll talk your ear off. maybe he’s just lonely. needs his voice to fill up space.

the sky is darker now out the window, little dark leaves flying around, or maybe those are birds. the rooftops shine with water. thunder and the tree branches start to go out of focus.

now that i’m done with my random virus, the virus i have been trying so hard to avoid for 1.5 years, the virus i have been thinking about for 1.5 years and will probably keep thinking about forever, the virus i have been trying to protect my family and friends from, (and yet i cannot protect them), i am still here in my room. what else is there to do? maybe in life, isolation never ends. i still have to live here with myself, a continued recovering.

a couple days after my CDC-designated end-of-isolation day, i went to a show at a weird little burned-out garage (benefit show for a new roof). groups of people were hanging out, drinking outside in an empty lot, probs where another brick building had burned down fully many years before. h and i could tell that people were avoiding us, since we were wearing masks, and lots of people knew we had just recovered from covid bc we’ve been posting abt it on social media (“covid gave me bad diarrhea”, “symptom of covid is self doubt :(” ). i can’t blame them really. i would avoid us, too. even though our noses and mouths won’t dispel “aerosols” anymore, our bodies still have that connotation attached. inside the little garage, we watched rob sing his songs with his headset microphone inside his mask. i heard him play his best quaran-tune live for the first time — “drive-thru still open.” in this weird and gross garage, with charred wooden beams as the ceiling that looked melted, and my friend g dancing in the corner in a bikini top, and a bunch of different groups of stl people all co-mingling and experiencing weird art. usually, this kind of busted DIY hang is the kind of shit i live for in STL. bums me out that i came home, guilted myself for being there, for participating in it, an event with crowds and many unmasked people. but none of this is my individual fault. i look forward to the day when i can go out, see people and music, and actually enjoy it, fully, without insecurity that i am doing harm.

the suddenness of the storm finally hits me as soon as it leaves, everything stained and colder. the blue sky comes back out underneath the darker heavier layer, and i rush outside to the garden to pull out some basil leaves for my aldi frozen pizza. the anxiety moment has lifted, too, for now, like a miracle. maybe it isn’t as timed as i think. that’s a coping mechanism in itself — convincing myself that my body has any kind of consistency or meaning.

i bought a book from the used book store in wicker park back in spring, back when i was just starting to leave the house after getting my second shot. i was browsing the “essays” section and opened up a book and it was about walking around the south side of st. louis, so i bought it without question. five months later, i opened it up and started reading it in my backyard, isolating during my case of covid. in the first sentence, the author is describing walking down _____ ave, my street, with his dog. on the walk, he’s thinking about the smells of people’s lives, lysol cleaner coming out of the window, (i can’t remember the other smells he mentioned: cigarettes? or burning leaves?) as the sense of smell relates to memory, he quotes proust: “the past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling.” he, too, is pondering “secret histories” of the city, and describes the experience of aromatic memory as “plumes” that pulse through our nervous systems. he then describes watching a hawk fly over roosevelt high school, and then the sun “[riding] the tree line of tower grove park.” it was pretty invigorating to read a contemplative walking-essay, one that quotes proust, and then see the words “tower grove park”. st. louis never appears in books.

it was strange to read this very short collection of essays, which was written in the early 2000s about paying attention to small living things in st. louis, creatures living in the city like sparrows and squirrels, and there was no mention of the people living there. maybe i’m mistaken, but i feel like in 2005 there would be a lot to say about early gentrification in south city or displacement of black people in the city. maybe he didn’t want to write *that* book. but why not? why can’t those issues exist too, among the philosophical tracks of considering mice in the house while also considering life and death.

what i criticize about this book is also my own insecurity about my writing, as many criticisms often are. the insecurity that i am telling only my story and leaving out important parts around me, outside me -— i am also leaving out the broader scope of bodies and covid and living in a gentrifying neighborhood (and maybe those topics together deserve to reside in a whole different essay).

i think writing should be personal *and* have an open attention to other lives. that’s the worst part about this pandemic, this country — that my experience is mostly limited to my home, and to myself. and writing, such as illness, is such a solitary experience. i am trying to explain it, to share it, so maybe i will multiply myself by writing it out, and i can stretch the experience into something else. attached to words, attached to other people and other memories and other images, my experience becomes something less lonely.