My Covid-19 Experience
Somehow we all assume every year is going to be our best year. There is absolutely nothing wrong in that thought only if the universe was listening and your stars were aligning to bring that wish into reality.
Not like everyone else, I always wondered how 2020 will span out for me. I had no plans, no projections, I probably was just ready to live. However, nothing prepared me for a lockdown and a subsequent shift in life. Not that i didn’t know of COVID-19, i had heard of it, read of it but i looked at it only as a foreign sickness, something that could happen elsewhere and not here. A pandemic that could not cross borders; only that I was wrong.
Staying at home voluntarily is one thing, but when you are asked to deliberately stay at home because there is something in the air that could kill you is another thing, a very uncomfortable other thing. I have always enjoyed living alone until I was locked down in my room with only my walls as a companion, living alone was no more enjoyable. My phone became my best friend, I jumped on trends, slept on social media and talked to my books.
I wrote a lot of poetry and discarded them, I read a lot of lockdown stories until I got exhausted from doing routine. I finally braced myself, sat in front of my mirror, the image I saw shook me. I was looking at myself but wasn’t quite seeing myself, at least who i always thought i was. It was a shifting process for me, an awakening. I had been so fixated on a certain someone that seeing myself now pushed me to pay attention to me.
I started to have conversations with myself, I allowed my demons to visit, talked about my professional career, imagined the kind of woman I wanted to be and the kind of life I wanted. I started to create the world in which I saw through writing and imagined a future I wanted through poetry. It was beautiful and then it was sad at the same time, that a pandemic had to wake me up, that I was in the middle of a pandemic and could die unannounced.
So I allowed loss visit and I thought of it. Just like the way I thought of dying.
I imagined dying in the way Covid-19 made it and I cringed. I imagined living fully, large, beautifully, colorfully and a strange illness from nowhere, snatches the life out of you. The dying process, the loss of smell, the running nose, the difficulty in breathing and then life gone.
Then the loss, i imagined i lost someone i knew to COVID-19, the devastation of an unexpected loss, the absence of a body that once existed, that once lived, snatched by an unknown illness, an illness that never existed, that you are still trying to understand, that you are still wrapping your head around it. It’s the loss, the removal, the separation, the gone for long.
Earlier this year I was admitted to the ER of Nyaho medical centre with COVID-19 patients, I saw how people grovelled for air and how oxygen was scarce. It all became so real to me; dying and the loss. I was terrified for myself, for them, their families and the loss.
It’s all of this and nothing but I have come to understand the world and living. It is unexpected and sometimes, most times, maybe quite often, Life just has a way of surprising us in ways we never imagined and every single time we are left with no choice but to adopt.
