I can already tell you, this week is going to be the one to test me. My first time going out in public in 9 months, and it’s to drop off an at-home COVID test for my mom and dad. They are the only ones to take them, because if they have it, I definitely do and my brother will definitely be fine.
For 9 months I’ve been careful. Calculated. Not left the house, not travelled, not “lived” which is seemingly the obsession amongst people who think 2 months at home is a prison sentence. I was the smart one. The one with the medical masks, the cloth masks, the homemade masks, and the masks bought years and years ago with the purpose of keeping my immunocompromised ass safe in case something were to go wrong.
For 9 months, I didn’t apply to schools. I didn’t go to college. I didn’t work (in person). I didn’t drive. I even stopped walking outdoors because a man decided that my wearing of a mask was reason to yell at me and try to follow me home. For 9 months, I have treated this pandemic like the plague and bubonic death sentence it is, and one day has undone 9 months of solitude. If one day had taken me back to the March 13th I began quarantine and started everything over, I would’ve grumbled and sighed. If one day had promised me that I would spend countless more alone in my room, I would have cried. But, no. This one day wasn’t merciful nor could it bend the hands of time. This one day could only do one thing. This day could make me sick, and it did.
I wrapped up my dad’s COVID test, and my mother did her own. That was when I first felt it. That itch in my throat. My voice was hoarse for the last few days, and I was okay with that. I was singing and rapping and doing everything with my vocal cords that I usually did. I was running laps on borrowed noises, and I knew sooner or later, that pain would come back to haunt me in the recesses of my throat.
Then, came the large, whooping coughs. That was later on. After I went into the pharmacy, and stood, for the first time, in public. I stood next to people who I didn’t know in a place I had been time and time again. It was the estranged picture of normalcy. I stood in Christmas decor and tinsel, holding the insurance card to buy $280 worth of tests for something that could kill me. Something that, if given the chance, would kill me. And yet, the world spun on. Mothers walked with children. Eldery couples grabbed socks for grandkids. The boy in front of me sent texts and the girl off to the side sent glances my way. The world continued to write its own narrative when I knew my character arc could end. I watched words spring from the Santa displays around me, and overtake the few phrases I could muster.
No one around me knew that maybe, just maybe, this would be the last time I was a passing stranger. Maybe this was the last time I went out in public while I was still lucky enough to have both parents. Maybe this is the last time I am the person I am right now, and I don’t know how to hold her burial yet. I don’t know how to grieve before the death is realised.
I know I’m being a bit dramatic, but I deserve to be. I could die. Literally. I could cease to live and exist and breathe and I am only 18. I am young. I haven’t done all the things I want to. I could die and I was so careful. For 9 months. I wanted to build mountains and yet, all I’ve been able to do is push myself under the dirt.
I’m getting sick of people telling me I’m overreacting. I’m reacting with the pent up pain of 12 years of trauma in my bones. My trauma has been made of pure lightning and the white hot hatred of everything I will never be able to be. I am wounded and fragile, not like a dying daisy, but like a grenade without a pin. I am hurting and I will show the world how much shrapnel I’ve been shoving into myself to avoid hurting everyone else.
I don’t want to be bitter and angry. The first time I was dying, I was bitter and angry. I ripped IVs from my arms and fought phlebotomists. I yelled at doctors and my mother. I remember being electrocuted alive by the tiny grey suction cups and I remember waking up during a spinal tap. I remember the visceral pain and reality of never existing again. I’ve already flipped off God, and I refuse to go back for the consequences. I know what it means to feel your atoms tear themselves apart and for a while my heartbeat was only made of the nuclear radiation circulated through my thoughts.
I don’t want to be bitter and angry, but I have been so wronged and so pacifistic for so long that I don’t know what I can be at this point. On Thursday, I will know if my family is COVID positive, and I’ll know if I have to think about the worst.
When I was 6, and I knew that I could die early, I had this one thing that I needed done before I died. I loved and still love the movie Empire Records. In the film, one of the main ragtag misfits working at the record store, Deb, is heavily depressed. I didn’t know that when I watched it at 6 or 7. In the movie, she holds a living funeral for herself, in which she lays lifeless on a counter in the back of the store while her friends talk about what they love about her. She then reveals she is doing this because she attempted to kill herself the night prior.
I decided that if I knew I was dying, I wanted to have a say in my last memories with friends. I had never told anyone this, but if I really am sick and really could die, there isn’t a point to keeping secrets anymore. I wanted to have my own living funeral. I never found a friend group close enough to do this with, but I now have one. And it sucks that I’ve lost friendships over my disease- there are simply people who refuse to embrace death in the way I have to- but, there is a silver lining in knowing that I have a group to have a funeral for me, just in case.
This week is going to be hard, but just like every time in the past, I’ll get through it and I’ll live to tell the tale. On Thursday, I’ll know if 9 months meant anything to me and my autoimmune disease.
Comments