Goosepimples

Song of the Week: “Days by The Drums” 

Day 3: Saturday 4/16, 11:42am 

I got here two days ago, and it’s been kind of a blur. Yesterday went by so fast. I’m super sick and I’ve been just lying around basically watching TV all day, which is restful and I guess what you’re supposed to do when you’re sick, but it doesn’t feel very good. I feel like I need to be making art or writing, or watching a really good movie, or calling my friends and having facetime/zoom parties. Why do I feel like I have to do that? I have this deadly disease and I can’t even walk outside without infecting and possibly killing people, and it’s super shitty and I feel physically and mentally terrible all the time, and I can’t feel satisfied just taking care of my body. 

And I worked so hard, and I killed myself, and you broke my bones, and I sold my soul. 

I feel bad that I’m not working out because it feels like I’m not being healthy or taking care of my body. Why, though? Why is resting while you’re sick not taking care of your body? Would trying to do pushups every morning between blowing my nose and hacking up loogies really be any healthier than just lying in bed? It’d honestly probably just make me nauseous and dehydrated. I could be walking up and down the room to get my legs moving, get my steps in. I feel like I’m not getting enough steps in. Does walking 20 feet from the door to the window over and over again count? I get up from the couch and walk to the bed and lie there for a while before walking back. I do that maybe 3 or 4 times a day. And to the bathroom, that’s easy too. If I walked much more than that though I’d probably get light headed and start breathing heavily, which would just make me cough more.  

I’m also not doing homework. But what homework do I even have that I need to do? One of my professors said if I don’t do any of the assignments I won’t get points off. And when I stare at an assignment or a reading and do try to work I get tired and frustrated and dizzy and confused. It would not be helpful, or productive to try to slog my way through that all weekend. I wouldn’t finish, and I also wouldn’t retain probably any of it.  

We were just wasting time, we were just wasting time. And now days go by.  

Since I have all this free time because I’m not working, I feel like I should be creative. Write a song, make a cool quarantine short film, write a book, or a cool short story about someone going crazy in a locked hotel room. Or just color and draw on the back of my paper delivery bags. I feel like I’m wasting time not being creative and making something out of my experience. How fucked up is it that I have this deadly virus that has killed millions of people and I’m coughing and congested and feverish and still first and foremost thinking about my self-worth in terms of my ability to make something to prove that my time was spent efficiently and productively?  

Mmm.  

I just feel like after all that’s happened, something good has to come out of this. It can’t just be seven days alone in a hotel room that go by in the blink of an eye.  

But maybe that is all it has to be, all it can be.  

Even now, typing this, I’m thinking about how I’m going to turn this into the Lawrentian and it’s going to be a super cool diary journal thing of my life with Covid-19 in quarantine. But at the end of each day, all I can really do is sit and lie down and eat and sleep. Maybe nothing good has to come out of this. Maybe my body healing and recovering is the only good thing that can come out of this. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been taught my whole life that the only thing that makes me worthy of living, of existing, is the work that I do, what I put into the world, what I can produce. Be that an art project, or homework for a class, or even a better, more sculpted and aesthetically pleasing body. Are these really the things that I want?  

What do I really want?  

Right now, in this moment, I just want to not have to think about how I can’t breathe through my goddamn nose and to just pass the time until my alarm goes off so I can take more cough syrup. I just want to sit on my ass and for it to be Tuesday already so I can stop being sick and go home and see my friends again.  

— 

And now days go by, and I never needed you.

Aside from my fever, I didn’t get chills while I was in quarantine. I just got sick, a little depressed, and bored out of my mind. Eleven days, a box of tissues, two bottles of cough syrup, and three positive tests later, here I am, finally back home in my dorm, and getting ready to go back to in person class tomorrow. After all of that, just being home is a good enough thing.