EVIL WINK OF COVID
As I have been wading through retired days, I threw myself into a secluded life, and never sought the solidarity of social circles. I don’t deny if I may prefer to hang about; it assures me a sense of belonging, a good-natured string to come together with a few good friends. But often, I’m held back by a bind like I pursue a sequence of hobbies: reading, writing, and photography, which discourages me not to mingle much. Also, I’m alarmed when I look down from the second-floor corridor at how the unstoppable Coronavirus has incapacitated the world.
I hid in the corners of my library for more than a year and a half, seeking all the precautions and protocols not to allow the evil tentacles of the Covid virus into my dwelling.
But the pest did not spare me; the viral’s deadly embrace; it was so traumatic that I concluded I’m inching closer to death. My oxygen levels seem to dip and the hum of twenty-four hours of oxygen concentrator supporting me seems depressively inadequate to secure my asthmatic lungs functional. “I don’t know for how long.” I kept mumbling the hunch to myself.
If we liken the Covid viral attack as life imprisonment, another monstrous shock seem to wait to strike: I got assaulted by yet another life-threatening raid – the black fungus – I was told it’s a fungal infection, which lays a lethal grip on the brain functioning, nothing but hurried death penalty – which almost pushed me closer to financial dearth, and depression. It felt like the bulk of death sleeping next to me!
I tossed helplessly on the hospital bed for two long months. Though I’m back home, it’s been three months that they pronounced me I’m “clean and free from any fungal infections,” I couldn’t shake myself from that bizarre fear of death. The odd feeling never left me. In the following days, I saw myself thriving to gather my esteem, sunken weight, incomplete books, unfinished drafts, unedited photos. I have applied all that as my honest struggle to shoo away those ominous, deathly phantoms. Every morning I encouraged myself attempting to indulge in those activities that would swell my original self: holding a book in my sixty-year-old trembling fragile hands, the same determined hands knocking down the keyboard thawing the frozen mental clutter to drizzle down as words and my nature-loving hand pressing the shutter button mesmerized by the colors, a few days ago, I savagely imagined, I would never see again.
