𝔞𝔷𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔤𝔴𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔩𝔶𝔫 𝔨𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔞𝔫 🕷️🍂

okay, so after a week short of a year of long covid—

ame brought me a simple lego set to assemble; i had a sense of how this was liable to go, but i prepped myself to Do A Thing and started assembly.

it took me multiple hours and totally wiped me out, but i pushed through.

my observations about the process:

1. increasingly, starting a month or two ago, i no longer have reliable fine motor control. hands shake; fingers twitch; i can randomly lose the connection between brain and hands and forget how to hold or use simple things. last night i tried to type, and it just didn't work.

2. my brain holes are quickly expanding. i've always had memory and retrieval issues, especially around nouns and verbs and my own past actions—but now, i can't seem to hold a thought in ram for four seconds. i forget what i'm doing or saying or how to say it almost immediately.

3. everything exhausts me now: sitting up in bed, even propped on an elbow; slowly moving my arms around to arrange and select and place bricks.

this growing fatigue exacerbates the aforementioned shaking and working-ram problems, and also gives me vertigo and nausea; generally all that comes with pre-syncope. a feedback loop forms.

so after an hour and a few dozen pieces assembled, i was panting; gasping; sweaty; dizzy; bedraggled. i felt like i had been punched in the gut and hit over the head. i had gone non-verbal before i started, but now speaking to me froze me in place as i struggled to process words.

so this is where i am currently: with single-minded focus, assembling a straightforward 219-piece lego set the size of a crabapple, with no fancy pieces or moving parts or off-label connection, somehow takes me a whole night. the task knocks me out, wheezing and vibrating and ill and confused and quietly weeping in pain.

...

and of course partway through i accidentally thought of kelly and just froze. my body went into some kind of standby mode; slumped where i was sitting, unable to move or think, for i'm unsure how long. when i could feel myself breathing again, the world was spinning as if underwater.

anyway, this sucks.

i don't recommend any part of long covid, i tell you what.

(... or of my ex-girlfriend either, but that's largely a separate problem)

("which of the two is worse," you ask? heck if i could answer that, even if my brain still functioned on a meaningful level. 🤷🏻‍♀️)

at a glance i think i first contracted covid 51 weeks ago tomorrow—monday february 27th, 2023. i'm sitting here days away from a full year of shit. one of hardest and most distressing years of my life.

like anything, i guess it had its better moments. got myself an adorable boy(?)friend. finally made a close local buddy (tho we'd met earlier). played a few good video games. got my home set up much closer to how i really want it.

and—well.

of course i learned some important lessons about trusting my own judgment about people, versus making them every excuse for things they more than didn't ask; that they would never in their healthiest moments have imagined there could be a single reason to consider apologizing for.

you'd think my first four decades on this planet might have driven that point into my skull, but this is a new life here; a new me. and i guess azurelore must make a few of her own bad decisions.

at least the decisions were all mine to fuck up, this time. so that's... progress?