Love Sick

The evening of the Christmas party was torturous. I imagined what it must have been like, and in my semi-fevered state I kept thinking about Kendra, and who if anyone she might be with there. I remembered the boyfriend, in the window on that SUV ride. She’d broken up with him. The idea that she’s available, and whatever that meant, kept popping into my head. Jeff called her for me, and I was supposed to be with her but instead I was moping in my apartment, feeling myself sink more and more into sickness.

I woke up the next morning feeling even worse, but the first thing that came into my head when I got up was a deep sense of loss for not getting to have seen Kendra the night before. Then the chills and the weird brain fog came on. I decided to brave the outdoors and go to an urgent care center. I put on one of my K-95 masks and a face shield I hadn’t worn since the summer. I also had surgical gloves. I didn’t want to get anyone sick on an attempt to get better I knew would be in vain. I had gotten the virus over the summer, and the experimental medicines didn’t really do much. But I felt hopeless, and I couldn’t get Kendra out of my head.

I got strange looks at the urgent care center. We were almost three years into the pandemic and a lot of people weren’t taking it seriously. I was starting to have my doubts but getting it again knocked them out of me. I had gone to this urgent care center before, it was the closest one to my house and I haven’t head a primary care physician in a decade, but I didn’t recognize anyone. Turnover at places like that can be high, though there’s usually at least one pretty nurse. I like to flirt with them, it makes me feel a little less vulnerable and weak and they are always sweet even though they it’s usually clear they’re not interested. They’re not my proudest moment but I bring it up because I remember that day when I went in there was a nurse who was stunning, and she started flirting with me. When I took my mask off she said losing faces like mine was one of the small sadnesses of the pandemic, and then she smiled a smile at me that lingered too long. I smiled back but all I could think of was Kendra.

-What’s wrong? she asked me at some point. I must have looked lost in my thoughts.

-Nothing, I muttered back.

-Something’s on your mind.

-Someone, I answered without really thinking about. I hadn’t meant to share my thoughts with anyone.

-Oh yeah? A special someone?

-I’d like her to be, I said with a sigh.

-Does she want to be?

-I don’t know yet, I said wistfully. I still hadn’t made eye contact with her. I can’t get close enough to her.

-Oh.

The nurse walked out of the room after that.

I was given a prescription and sent on my way. I didn’t realize the nurse was flirting with me until I was walking home. I asked myself what was wrong with me but chalked it up to the brain fog from COVID, the symptom that shocked me the most the first time I got the virus. It was the symptom most different from any cold or flu, and what was scary was you didn’t know which thoughts were really yours. But I knew I had been developing feelings for Kendra Badger even before coming down the virus. The brain fog just made things seem clearer. At that moment I wanted to march myself directly to Badger’s district office and tell her exactly how I felt, but I knew I was a walking public health hazard. I decided to take a walk through the park on my way home. It took a lot of energy to come outside and I wasn’t sure when I would be well enough to do it again. I tried to take in what little sights there were—a few mothers braving the cold because they couldn’t say no to their children, a couple of joggers, it seemed to be getting more popular during the pandemic, and an older man having a picnic under a tree all by himself, in a parka that looked twice his size.

When I got home I collapsed on my bed. I thought the trip out and back had knocked the energy out of me, but I had a dream that told me differently. Kendra was in it, on a pedestal at a distance of what just seemed like a few feet from me. There were a few steps between us, but as I started climbing them she appeared to get further away. She didn’t notice me until I could barely see her, then she leaned forward to reach her hand out to me, and it seemed so close but when I reached back toward her to grab it, I tripped and fell. When I looked up, I was awake again. It was the middle of the night. I got up and sat at my desk and wrote out a letter to Kendra. I explained that I’d been thinking about her since she came to my door, that I desperately wanted to get to know her better and that I think that she did too, and that I knew her politics were not who she was and that she just needed someone to help her find her truer self. I left it on the desk and went back to bed with severe chills. When I woke up in the morning I had forgotten about the letter. I made some ginger and turmeric tea and ate a few crackers at my window for breakfast. I hated being stuck in the house. I didn’t do well during the lockdown and the thought of just five days at home seemed unbearable. When I found the letter I read it as if for the first time. I thought I sounded crazy and blamed the brain fog, tearing the letter up and throwing it in the trash. It made me feel sicker and I went back to bed.

I largely stayed in bed for weeks after that—I was convinced I was dying but kept it to myself. I celebrated New Year’s Eve and rang in 2023 bed-ridden, and spent the first several months of the year confined to my home fighting long Covid. When I finally started feeling better it was almost summer. My cousin Bronco came to visit and ended up convincing me to join him on a trip to California, where he said he had good work waiting for us on some kind of agricultural concern. I hadn’t even seen Kendra Badger in months but was still crestfallen over her so I decided to go with him. We ended up working on a plant farm in California. It was a lot more work than it sounded like and a lot less money than Bronco made it seem but it got me out of town. I gladly signed a three month contract, and then convinced Bronco to sign a second one when our first term was over. It was almost winter again when I returned to the city. Then I got caught up in the second arrests.