Covid Moon

The memoir course you took during the summer of 2020 feels like forever ago. Tuesday nights, you gathered with seven other women over zoom for an online writer’s workshop. One woman was writing travel essays, another about her divorce, another a hundred different scenes of coming out. That memoir class unspooled over the early months of lockdown. Instead of the textured, vibrant, embodied life you were used to, you lived through words, including the drafts shared by those women. Instead of going dancing on Thursdays, you wrote about dancing. Instead of hosting elaborate dinner parties, you daydreamed about parties. The pandemic rendered life virtual, pixelated, digitized. Mary Margaret—the workshop’s most senior participant, age 78—wrote about surviving the pandemic in ordinary, daily ways: getting the paper, watering her houseplants, buying guavas from Central Market. “These days,” she wrote, “there is a bonus. When I smell the guavas, I know I am still well, have not contracted Covid-19.” 

Fast forward a year and several months—which feels like a lifetime, an aeon of human history. Everything about your life has changed: where you live, what you do you during the days, the clothes you wear, and even the virus, with half the Greek alphabet’s worth of variants.

You quit your nonprofit job, finding yourself unable to solicit donations for online arts criticism during a global pandemic; yes, the arts are essential, but you couldn’t make yourself write another solicitation letter to Houston’s billionaire-adjacent arts patrons, so you resigned.

Your husband, Michael, worked from home for two brief months before his company called everyone back to the office. He came home in the evenings, eager for some time to himself, and you met him at the door like a touch-deprived puppy asking to go on a walk. You resented how stereotypical this felt: wife, at home all day eating bonbons, bored and hungry for attention when the working husband comes home. Michael is a gamer, a tinkerer, happiest in front of a screen or fiddling with tools in the garage. He doesn’t crave human interaction the way you do, like it’s water and you’ve been lost in the desert. The pandemic didn’t seem to drastically reshape Michael’s life. Instead, it pushed more of his friends online for marathon video game sessions. Between his headset and the fiber internet, he was more connected than ever. You sat in the living room, sullen, feeling like a fishing lure cut off from the line, rusting on the murky bottom of a lake. 

You zoomed with writing groups, watched a lot of Netflix, hummed along to musical soundtracks. You read War and Peace on your kindle and memorized every song from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 and you applied and got accepted to grad school: Pacific University MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Finally, something to do besides shuffle around your apartment in maroon slippers and watercolor your anxieties. 

Advent felt appropriate for last December: a season of waiting for coming salvation. Do you remember what it was like, anticipating the approval of the vaccination—a solution that existed just beyond the visible horizon, a deus-ex-machina that would glide into the social theater on greased wires and solve everything, restore life to a better, more conscious and compassionate version of ‘normal’? 

The vaccine was approved. You remember the first time a friend called you and told you they’d gotten it—a government employee whose boss told her when the local hospital had extra doses. After the shot, the nurses gave her a commemorative sticker.

“A sticker?” you repeated. “I want a sew-on patch!”

When the vaccines were released to the general public, you coordinated with friends to get on lists. Liz got it because she was postpartum. Her husband, like most of Michael’s friends, drove to Baytown to get jabbed. You signed up for an appointment in rural east Texas, where vaccine availability outnumbered people. You drove an hour and a half each way through the Big Thicket National Preserve, almost losing cell phone service and your way. During the drive out there, you listened to country radio, and you were pleasantly surprised to hear a Public Service Announcement by country star Blake Shelton urging his friends, family, and fellow Americans to mask up and get vaccinated.

Michael got vaccinated and a new job. The two of you moved to Colorado—away from his family, towards yours. In Boulder, everything seemed high: vaccination rates, elevation, home prices, people. You participated in your second grad school residency via zoom from your parents’ dining room table. 

You got a new job, part-time, to help with rent. When you interviewed, masks were optional, but within three weeks of being hired, the Delta variant overtook national headlines, and the City of Boulder reinstated a mask mandate.

You cashiered at the liquor store throughout what you, and everyone around you, believed was the long, trailing end of the pandemic, like one of those scarves a magician pulls out of their hat that just keeps coming, changing color, piling up on the shiny black floor at their feet. People came in wearing beanies and face gaiters so all you could see was the two inches of wind-chapped skin around their eyes. With so little to go on, you regularly carded people well over fifty. 

In the break room, employees were allowed to remove their masks, and you were consistently caught off guard by how differently people looked when you could see their whole faces. Some people hid acne under there, or—even more startling—facial hair. You almost choked on your lunch when a male coworker pulled down his mask and revealed a bristly mustache stowing away like a weasel on his top lip. You dreamed of the day when you wouldn’t have to wear a mask to work, when you could see people’s faces, when you wouldn’t have to project your high-pitched customer service voice through a plexiglass screen to ask if they would like a receipt or not. 

November: you and Michael return to Texas for the first time since your move. You stay in the renovated ManCave, the garage apartment above his mom’s house, the same apartment where Michael lived before you got married. His mom renovated it since then, so it’s a cozy spot for a short vacation, 600 square feet of memories of when you were dating and newly in love. 

You’re scheduled to spend Thanksgiving Day with Michael’s dad’s side of the family, so you go over to his house the night before. Michael’s dad, Andy, and his wife, Leslie, warn you to use only the downstairs bathroom: the guest bedroom shares a bathroom with Leslie’s sixteen-year-old son, Bennett, who has the flu. He’ll be quarantining in his room the whole time, Leslie assures you, but you can tell from Michael’s shoulders that he’s uncertain about the arrangement. 

You belonged to a very cautious community in Houston throughout the first year of the pandemic. You and Michael made choices you believed were safe—hosting a friend or two for dinner or happy hour in the front yard, the living room floor lamp plugged into an exterior outlet; driving to Salado to meet Michael’s mom and her boyfriend to clean out his late grandmother’s house; spending a weekend at a rental cottage in Galveston to meet your friend’s new partner—and then you questioned those choices, afraid of not what would happen to you but what people might say if they knew. Growing up evangelical imbued you with a knee-jerk response to shame: you find yourself mired in it as naturally as an alcoholic turns to liquor. Judgment and alienation come easily to you; they are the hammer and nail of your moral toolbox. You’re young and fit and lack co-morbidities, so, while you respect the reality of the virus, you’re not worried about death or long-term symptoms. But you fear social censure: being seen as villainous for your survival choices, losing friends because they think you’ve acted recklessly. 

The morning of Thanksgiving, you wake up early. You slink downstairs to the winter-quiet living room, hoping to squeeze in a few pages of writing before all the festivities begin. But you’re so tired. You open your notebook, push it onto the next cushion, curl up, and go back to sleep. Andy finds you snoozing there an hour later and makes you a cup of tasteless coffee that you grip like a lifeline. 

All the extended family carpools over for Thanksgiving. Uncle Johnny shows up with his requisite bottle of bourbon. This year he traded up his regular Basil Hayden’s for something top shelf, strapped into a three-sided wooden box like a glass-faced coffin.

“Who wants to go out on the man porch and have a snort of whiskey?” Andy asks. You trail the men outside, leaving Leslie in the kitchen. You’re not feeling up to meddling in another household’s gender dynamics, and you want whiskey more than you want to help cook. 

Out on the porch, Michael’s already nose-deep in his snifter glass. 

“Ooh, Johnny, this stuff is sweet,” he says. “I can smell the vanilla!” You swirl your glass, but it doesn’t release any spicy, oaky aromas. You drape your nose over the edge of the glass like a fishing pole dangling over water and give a hesitant sniff. Nothing. No sweet, no vanilla, no familiar liquor burn, tingling your nose like flame on the fingertips. You crane your neck to get your nose further in the glass, really shoving it in there, but still the liquor remains scentless, as flat and un-aromatic as a glass of water. Shit. You can’t smell anything. 

You take a cautious sip. There’s the vanilla, but it’s faint, a distant silhouette of flavor perceived through fog. You go into the kitchen, pour a mug of coffee, and hold it under your nose like smelling salts used to wake someone from a trance. Nothing. You can taste the coffee—nutty, rounded, a nagging undertone of bitterness that clings to your tongue like felt—but you can’t smell it. You think of Mary Margaret’s bowl of guavas and acknowledge your fate: you have covid. 

You make it through Thanksgiving dinner, but the day is a hazy, red-and-gold blur. You remember it the way you would remember a drunken ride on a merry-go-round. The air is heavy with the smell of turkey and gravy and spices, but you’re deaf to it. You notice that English doesn’t even have a word for unable-to-smell the way we do for the other senses: deaf, blind, mute. 

You keep drinking, because Andy bragged about how he’d shelled out for the holiday: three bottles of wine for sixty dollars each, so you know it’s good stuff, even if you can only halfway taste it. Everything you consume is strained through an invisible flavor-muffler. 

Towards the end of dinner, Andy asks what’s wrong with the wine. 

“Get me that bottle,” he tells Michael. Michael hands it over and Andy bursts out laughing. “This isn’t the nice wine! This is alcohol-removed wine!” Nobody had even noticed. 

Thanksgiving vacation part II: you and Michael were supposed to head up to the hill country, to his mom’s lake house, to repeat the holiday with her side of the family. You’re scheduled to drive up on Friday, but as soon as you get in the car, you tell Michael you need to go take a covid test. In the drive-through pharmacy lane at CVS, the attendant tells you, from behind protective plexiglass, that you need an appointment. The CVS website doesn’t work on your phone so Michael drives to a Walgreens while you make appointments on your phones. When you double-check the email confirmation, you realize you made the appointments for the next day. You cancel those while he drives out to a county-operated drive-through testing site in the suburbs. 

The drive-through testing site is an open-sided horse trailer with a petite, dark-haired woman in scrubs sitting at a fold-out table covered in medical supplies. She hands you plastic testing packets through the window of the car. In the time it takes you to scan the QR code and fill out the online form, three other cars queue up behind you. While you wait, a drizzly rain starts to fall, smearing the windshield, obscuring your vision. 

The results show up in your email before you make it back on the highway. You have no reason to doubt them, to take refuge in the theory of false positives—even though it would be a relief for science to lie to you. This is the moment you’ve been dreading for a year and a half, the boogeyman lurking in every overcrowded bar, sulking around the shadowy hallways at every imprudent family gathering. In this moment, with this nasal swab and email, you have officially joined the ranks of the infected. You pivot the car, your holiday plans, the rest of the year. 

Your mind is spinning with consequences and blurred by the onset of brain fog. Since you have covid, you can’t go up to the hill country for Thanksgiving Part II. You also can’t fly back to Colorado on Monday, can’t go back to work at the liquor store on Tuesday. Michael brought his work laptop, so at least he’ll be able to work remotely from the garage apartment. You pay rent by check and you won’t be back in town on the first. You’re about to run out of birth control. You should’ve brought more lingerie. You return to the garage apartment at your mother-in-law’s house and settle in for ten days of quarantine. 

The worst part of getting covid is the moral responsibility to inform everyone you potentially exposed. You don’t know how you got it, so you don’t know when you became contagious. You don’t know if the drowsiness and sneeziness you experienced last week were the routine symptoms of your ever-present allergies, or if they were the early indicators of coronavirus, warning flags that you should’ve heeded. You feel like a double-helix twist on the old holiday classic: the grinch who gave everyone covid on Thanksgiving. 

For the next several days, your phone buzzes with alerts from people you’d seen: confirmations of vaccination status, postulations about contagion timelines, sharing their negative test results. The only person you spread the virus to is your husband, so at least the two of you get to quarantine together.

Your second wedding anniversary happens while you’re in Texas. You’d planned to celebrate it properly—night at a hotel, fancy dinner out—once you got back from holiday travel, but covid erases your plans. What hasn’t the virus erased or altered in this past year? You start referring to quarantine as your covid-moon: nothing to do for ten days but hang out and gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes. And watch a lot of Netflix. 

You spend the first few days of quarantine doing nothing but sleeping, eating takeout, and watching anime. At Michael’s request, you delve into the shows of his youth. You binge-watch the entirety of Death Note—a show about an arrogant teenager who receives the supernatural ability to kill people—before the end of Michael’s scheduled vacation. On day five, Michael goes back to work. He telecommutes from the wooden dining set placed between the bed and the kitchenette in the 600-foot apartment. You’ve emailed the liquor store and apologized for your absence. Your manager asks for a photo of your positive test results for your file. I have a file? you wonder. Once that’s out of the way, you read and write for days on end. You chew through the stack of library books you brought.

One morning, you notice the pleasant combination of smells from the clementines on the table and the hazelnutty aroma of the craft coffee you’d just brewed. Then you realize: SMELL! You start sniffing, loud enough that Michael, sitting on the couch, hears you. He glances over to where you’re sitting on the bed like a badger with your nose lifted into the air. 

“Get your sense of smell back?” he asks. 

“Maybe!” 

“Go easy with it,” he suggests. “Don’t overwhelm your brain. After all, you have an immense capacity for…” he pauses, considering the right word.

“Self-delusion?” you offer. 

“Yeah,” he says.

Michael is content with this kind of routine. He could rotate through screens—work computer, personal laptop, tv, phone—endlessly. By day seven, day eight, the isolation starts to wear on you. You feel yourself growing restless, irritable, a caged animal. 

“I used to have a body,” you tell him. “I used to dance! And make things, and spend time with all kinds of people, and exist in the world beyond my own mind.” You send an angsty email to a friend who reminds you that ten days of isolation isn’t exactly an ideal setting for creativity, and to stop beating yourself up. The next day, you test negative. 

~ ~ ~

We’ve been living through this thing for nearly two years now, this thing that keeps evolving and changing, no month like the month before it—no strain like the strain before it—and yet, we can’t complete our stories because we’re not yet out the other side. Several months ago, another writer in my graduate program told me she doesn’t feel like she can write about covid until she knows more of how it came about. 

“You’re waiting for the reflective narrator to show up,” someone said.

Michael and I got covid. So? It felt so out-of-the-blue, anachronistic and devastating—not devastating because we were particularly sick, and it didn’t cause major financial or long-term health problems for us, and we didn’t infect anyone else—but because I held this ingrained narrative about morality that suggested by getting covid, I’d failed. I’d done something wrong. And then a new variant bloomed like a mushroom cloud, just as our symptoms were drying up like the aftermath of a rainstorm, and our story felt insistently relevant. But what is there to say about it? How do we make meaning out of something fundamentally arbitrary? 

Maybe there’s no meaning to make of it. Covid just is, and our lives are collectively filled with stories of sickness, of disruption, of our plans and our society being hijacked and rearranged by an invisible actor we can’t control or contain. My third grad school residency has just been moved online. Dad texted me last night that my sister-in-law came down with Covid, and we were together at my parents’ house for Christmas. The permutations keep coming. All we can do is keep living through it.