Waiting for Covid

Absurd, but I can't help myself.

It feels Beckett-level absurd, but since my daughter’s wedding last weekend, I have been beside myself, waiting for Covid.

The wedding was not you’d call a super-spreader event, but it was definitely a spreader event, like any crowded indoor gathering without masks in this pandemic moment. Some have gotten sick. Most haven’t, mind you, but a few loved ones are sick now, and I was around them quite a bit. I found out through various grapevines that a number of other guests have since tested positive.

I am waiting my turn.

My slightly hysterical nature has always been enhanced by a galloping paranoia. It’s a terrible combination. Every ache, every chill, every late afternoon dip of fatigue becomes Covid’s Beginning. I take my temperature compulsively (I am taking it now, in fact, as I write this) because I feel warm.

It’s 98.0.

I will test myself for the fourth time in as many days, though I know in advance that a single emphatic red line will appear. Negative.

Awww, come on test kit! Explain, then, the brain fog, the slight sore throat. The occasional stupor I find myself falling into. That feeling of impending doom.

I may not have Covid, but I cannot seem to shake my certainty that it is inevitable and headed my way, this illness that pretty much everyone describes as no big deal and feels like a bad cold, this illness that I have built into a ticking time bomb. Absurd, yes, but still, I wait.

Only today, I actually feel pretty good.