A COVID-19 fog — Refracting Hope

The virus may be invisible, but the fog it drags with it is not.

There are smiles now that we have flattened this COVID-19 curve, tentative, but there.

But not on my face.

After months of fear – is it months or only weeks?, I am blank - a smothering grey fog, moving with me, veiling everything, slightly see-through.

It does this neatly - memories of fear transposed over the present, almost an exact fit.

Others are looking to the future, cautiously, fearfully, with impatience, with joy, with whatever they are. I shy my eyes from a terrible future-past.

I am in a time, and then out of it.

Everything triggers me, everything. My hyperalert so powerful, a falling piece of paper is like an explosion – soundless to others. I have no control. No control at all. So many things happened to young me in a way that would flashback. So many things.

I never realised how many.

Some look forward to cafes opening, gyms, parks, visits with friends.

I am glad – for them. For me? I no longer care what restrictions are lifted, nor when. I do not want to do these things, although I liked some of them before. I don’t want to do much. At all.

I do not want my ears touched, nor my hair cut, can’t stand the thought of someone behind me. I do not want to touch anything either. Don’t even know whether to sit, to stand. I am dirty. Again.

And in my filth, I am lethargic. This fog can punch, knocking me for six.

So, I stumble along, trying to keep upright, alert then blank eyed, alert, blank – as my head splits into billions of little coloured boxes, a terrible Zoom without the faces, the pieces jagged, each its own colour. Vivid, blinding. The world tips, the pieces rearrange. And rearrange. And rearrange. Like the kaleidoscope which made me seasick as a child.

My shrapnel, the pile on the floor, now glass in a toy which keeps turning. Each turn clicking into – paralysis, tears, rage, cringing fear, silence. I try to hide it. I don’t know if I do.

It has great power, this fog.

It drags my arms down, like it wants to snap my spine, focuses and refocuses my eyes – everything too close, or too far away. Too far is detachment. Too close is the panic.

COVID-19 may bring with it loss of senses, but so does the fog. The detachment like a loss of taste, although I can still taste. I am 17 again.

It frightens me, this fog. I fight it like a child fights sleep. Fiercely. Invisibly.

Shrapnel when it comes in fog, scars.

This time I am not alone, lost in that grey – someone fights with me, something I am not used to, something I must remind myself of. One is two. So, it upsets me that the fog is there – because logically it should not be. I am disappointed in myself, that I cannot just get rid of it – smothering thoughts.

See how strong traumatic memories can be? When awoken.

I often lose something, when the fog comes. A talent, use of a body part. Always something left field. Seemingly unrelated, something precious.

This time?

I wander through the house, waiting, random bits of paper scattered everywhere. My thoughts. Sometimes just a two-word sentence, letters out of place. The word in my head different to the one in my fingers. I cannot spell reliably. My brain cannot connect reliably to my body.

COVID-19 victims shed virus.

Clumsily, unintentionally, I am shedding words – that I snatch up again and again and again.

And again.

Hope fears losing her words.

What happens to fog when I no longer fight alone?

When one is now two?

Originally written April, 2020