(Or Channeling My Inner Sloth)
The truth is I still feel like shit.
I can pretend that I'm alright, use my energy reserves to go to work or to a social event, and then all I want to do is sit back down on the couch or lie in bed and read.
I wake up most mornings with headaches, and I feel as if a fog exists between me and the rest of the world. It's been thirty-eight days since I contracted Covid19, cleared from quarantine weeks ago, but I still tire easily and feel like my blood sugar is low if I exert myself even a little. I also feel itchy on the inside of my body, especially the palms of my hand. And I'm more forgetful than my normal baseline of airheaded-ness.
It's a challenge to write. I seem to lose words. Lose my train of thought. I can't even call it a train. More like a line of snails slowly making their way out of my brain.
But books, books have leapt to my rescue.
A pile of them stand at attention by my bed, gifts from friends and family when I shared my double whammy of Covid and an injured knee. I love escaping into someone else's story, especially when my own plot line feels frayed. When themes of illness and injury pervade my narrative, I want to lose myself in stories of others overcoming perilous odds. I want to find heroes and heroines within the pages of a timeless book.
If you met my daughter, Olive, and hung out with her for an afternoon, you would soon learn about her love for Harry Potter. Her lengthy Christmas list includes a sorting hat, a Hogwarts sweatshirt, a Platform 9 and 3/4 lego set, Slytheran Robes (she recently switched over from Gryffander), and that's just the few I can remember at the moment. I've forgotten even more Harry Potter themed items on her list.
Olive started reading Harry Potter when the pandemic reached Alaska, when we didn't return to school after Spring Break, in March of 2020. When we didn't return to school for the rest of the year. When we cancelled plans and stopped hugging our friends. Back when we all thought this would be over by summer. That the next school year would be normal.
I'm not sure if I would have believed, if someone had told me then that Covid would stick around for a third year. That my school district and community would eventually tire of following mitigation plans. That despite being fully vaccinated, wearing a mask and keeping my distance, my body would still become infected by the disease. I would have found wizards flying on broomsticks playing quidditch more plausible than this trajectory.
Olive has now read the whole Harry Potter series over 50 times. That's not me exaggerating; she's keeping track. I had only read the first book, over 20 years ago, when I still lived in Portland Maine, long before parenthood. I told Olive I'd read them all someday, but in my head I always thought, "When will I ever have that much time?!"
On my first day of quarantine, I called to Olive: "Can you bring me the first two Harry Potter books?!"
Thirty-eight days later, I've read the first five, with a couple adult books woven in between. Number Six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sits on my bedside table, not even in the stack but on its own next to my coffee cup. I'm making myself pause and read Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandell, first, written in 2014 about a flu pandemic that wipes out civilization as we know it.
The plot line feels strangely familiar.
Makes me want to apparate to a different place where with the flick of my wand I can repair cellular damage. Where I can cast a spell that makes people listen to science, and see the difference between conspiracy theories and true stories of a global health crisis. Makes me want to drink a whole batch of butter beers or race against another seeker on my Nimbus 2000 to catch the golden snitch and win the game for my team.
The drama inside Hogwarts has truly sustained me over this last month plus. The conflict between good and evil, the teenage angst, the deepening friendships, the acts of bravery, the magic of it all. I understand my daughter's obsession with this series and her connection to Harry Potter fans across the globe. Now I can talk to her about Hermoine or Draco Malfoy or Dobby or He Who Must Not Be Named.
I have watched some of the movies with Olive over the past two years, but as always, the books gives us so much more insight. The internal dialogue of Harry Potter speaks to so many of us who have experienced loss and regret, who both crave attention and want to run from it, who waiver between confidence and insecurity, who struggle with a full range of human emotions and can't stop reflecting on our actions and their consequences.
Next week, I undergo surgery for my left knee. ACL repair and fixing a possible meniscus tear. I injured my knee playing casual soccer during recess with my 5th grade students over six weeks ago. If I'd only put on better shoes. If I'd stopped after I slipped on the wet grass the first time. If the ball had been passed to a different player...
After consistent physical therapy exercises, I can walk up and down stairs normally without much pain. I wear a brace and with it on I can even take short walks in the snow. It's hard not to wonder, what if I don't really need the surgery? What if could keep healing and return to sports without my ACL?
I feel as though I'm traveling backwards to go forwards. I will be on crutches and out of commission for months to a year, with the hope of returning to downhill skiing, pick-up hockey, soccer, softball, and ultimate frisbee. All the games and activities that sustain the little kid in me. That allow me to escape my reality as I chase after a ball, frisbee, puck or try to find the ultimate line down the mountain.
I'm not ready to give up sports, despite creeping close to fifty. So I'm opting for surgery, and a long recovery, with the hope that I can still play someday.
Now I also need all my Covid-19 symptoms to go away.
Until then, I will look to the wizards to save me.