One year gone

 In two days, I will have been working from home for a full year.

It's strange to think of all the things that I've grown accustomed to, in that year. No N Judah trains rumbling by, no lunches at work, no commute, making my own coffee, doing nothing, seeing nobody. I can't make myself participate in any of the online versions of the things I love, because... well, I don't know why. Honestly, staying home seems preferable to the disappointment of the pale shadow of what it was.

The question I posed in my second pandemic blog post was - what will be left when this is all over? So many of our favorite things have opened again only to re-close, and each time they do it wastes precious resources. How many times will they open and close, and will they ever open as they were, again?

And what am I going to be like? I feel like some sort of slug, like a potato. I can't get up the enthusiasm to get out of the house or go anywhere. Martin wants to make plans and I just can't get excited about anything. 

Part of this is that I'm still healing, I'm sure. I'm not back to 100% and I don't know when I will be. I honestly feel like I've been chasing 80% for weeks now, and not quite making it, but trying to get back to "normal" life again, whatever the hell that means, despite the pain and stiffness. My 3-month check in is on Monday and I'm terrified that they're going to tell me that the fusion isn't working, or that the third level we were supposed to do as an artificial disk has now failed and that's what's causing the pain. I don't know. I don't know. I'm scared. And I want so desperately to get back to "normal" even though there is no normal to get back to.

Some part of me has been observing with wry detachment as my brain... recovers... from all this pain. The silence that's rung in my head since May of 2017 (interspersed with gratingly loud loops of gratingly repetitive snippets of music) has been fading away. I thought it could've been that the breakup damaged my brain, because the rest of me felt weirdly physically fine but - what if it was the car crash? What if this degeneration started with whiplash in May of 2017 and took nearly two years to blossom into the first spasm (March 2019), and another 18 months to cause the second? I oscillate between dubious and angry that it could be true.

I'm angry at a lot of things right now. The housing market, politics that pits humans against their own interest, the pandemic, climate change. 

I would just like to go somewhere for awhile where I can make things and not be angry anymore, and not have to worry about how I'm going to get money or food or shelter or healthcare. I just want some sort of rest.