2020.08.01
I was sick today...I think.
If it is anything, it is a decidedly unpronounced sickness. I awoke different, listless, but could point to no real symptoms beside a light cough when Manon asked to describe what was happening. The most honest description I could conjur was that I could feel a faint rattling behind my eyes, a description I kept to myself because it seemed strange enough that uttering it aloud would maybe be construed as a whole other type of cause for concern.
Feeling sick at all is complicated right now, something that easily gains steam towards an overwhelming sense of dread. It could be nothing, a bit of dehydration and heat exhaustion from a day-old bike ride through the unshaded concrete of New Orleans’ downtown. It could also be the thing, something I’m not even scared of for me, but because if I have the thing, then those who I live with and love will also have it.
This dread, a dread of confronting the mortality of others, is one that has been omnipresent since February of this year, but that omnipresence has rendered it almost inert, something too large to stare directly at. It is a deep ocean of uncertainty with waves that sweep by and all you can do is let each lift you, suspended, simply trying to keep your head above it until it rolls onward, with the promise of more to come.
To have that world of fear squeezed into this small, sunlit apartment, is more than I can bear. So I find myself yet again, staring slightly to the left of it, allowing it to fill my periphery, for the utter lack of any better idea.