I guess I should consider myself lucky for catching Covid only now, December 2021.

There are many factors that speak for luck: it’s not the first variant and we know much more about the virus now; I have received two shots of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, so this breakthrough Covid has good chances of being mild; I am young and healthy; I have been self-isolating even before I found out for sure, so probably haven’t passed it to my husband and kids.

Yet a week into this tête-à-tête tiny bedroom lock-in with the virus, I sometimes drop the sugarcoating spoon, stop counting my blessings, and let the reality sink in.

I caught Covid on a trip back home to Kazakhstan. Fist in two years, and lasting only two days, because I needed to see my dad who just got out of the hospital briefly before an operation. He’s got the opposite. Underlying health condition, urgently needed operation in the nearest future, and he’s the one who passed Covid to me, unknowingly. There are many unfortunate things that aligned themselves into a straight line of such distress that it almost seems like a curse looming over my family. These things, unexpected as they always are, kept pushing themselves through the door, uninvited, catching everyone off guard. It’s like one of them got the lock cracked  — that allowed all the others lurking outside to start pooling in. With them — all the feelings and emotions that we managed to avoid or at least keep at bay for a long time. 

Fear.

I understand well – or at least I’d like to think that I do – that life is not simple, and happiness is not something you can count on grasping once and not letting go for the rest of your days. I also know there is a definite end to the rest of your days, and mercifully no one really knows when it’s coming. Fear – that primal feeling that usually works for our benefit and increases chances of survival  – is also an enemy when it’s not instant and reactive to something that can be helped by our actions. It can soak through our conscious and stay there, as the undercurrent of our daily life, and you only become aware that it hasn’t left you all this time when you turn off the lights in the evening, exhausted after the longest day, and you can’t sleep.

I fear for my dad every minute. I fear for my family and my children. I fear for where we’re heading politically, socially, ecologically. I’m afraid of being the cause of Covid for someone, and I am also afraid to be the cause of pain. I fear for myself, even though I know that technically the day after tomorrow my symptoms should start easing. Unless they don’t.

Is there any comfort in acknowledging the fear? If there is, I don’t feel it. I call it out many times, but because what’s at stake is still at stake no matter how many hours I spend analysing it and whichever sources of authority, science or faith I turn to, I’m not any less scared.

That’s life. The illusion that I am the master of my own life is no longer there, but I sure am not helpless and being here for the ride I accept what it sends my way, our way. There’s always something good to look forward to, and right now I am just waiting impatiently for a negative antigen test to tell me in a simple solitary line that I can finally hug my children. 

Image: Jim Griffin, licensed under CC0 1.0