I was being held captive.
I was in a room that was crawling with bugs and someone told me that this was how you got Covid, and I shouldn’t go near the bugs. But they were already covering me.
My brother and I were in a freight car and we had monitors on us that showed our heart rates going lower and lower because we didn’t have enough air. There was all this garbage in there with us and I found a Christmas card and wrote HELP on it and told my brother to hold it through the slats in the car’s wooden side.
I was tied to a pole and I knew I was going to be sold as a sex slave.
I was in the basement of NYU （I’ve never even been to New York City, so don’t ask me why） and someone was trying to give me medicine and I knew it was poison.
I was locked in a basement and tied down and I couldn’t get out.
I pause, thinking of my dream about Finn when I was in the Galápagos, or my not-dream, or whatever it was. It, too, had been in a basement. And I was tied down.
I dreamed that my four-year-old grandson, Callum, drowned. I went to the funeral with my daughter and helped her grieve and lived through her having two more kids, twin girls, Annabelle and Stacy. When I woke up for real, I asked her if I could see the twins and she thought I was crazy. She said the only grandkid I had was Callum, and sure enough he was alive and well.
I think about my mother’s face, still and white on the iPad, her chest barely rising.
I read for hours, stopping only to eat leftover Thai food for lunch. There are hundreds of posts from people who have been delirious from lack of oxygen or who have, like me, survived ventilation. I read lush, sprawling dreamscapes. Some are terrifying, some are tragic. Some have common threads—the videogame scenario, the basement entrapment, and seeing someone who’s died. Some stories are detailed, some are a scant few words. All are described as painfully, unequivocally real.
As one person in the Facebook group puts it: If I’d never woken up, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Everything I was seeing, feeling, EXPERIENCING was genuine.
For the first time since I’ve awakened, I realize that I’m not crazy.
That I’m not alone.
That if all my good memories of the Galápagos didn’t actually happen … ?then neither did my bad ones.
Which is why, come hell or high water, I am going to visit my mother.
That day, Finn calls me three times from work. Once he asks if he left his phone charger in the bedroom （no）。 The second time he asks if I want him to pick up dinner on the way home （sure）。 The third time I tell him he should just ask me how I’m doing, since that’s why he’s really calling.
“Okay,” he says, “how are you doing?”
“Not bad. I’ve only fallen once and I’m pretty sure that the burn on my hand is second degree, not third.”
“What?”
“Kidding,” I tell him. “I’m fine.”
I do not tell him that I have been reading obsessively about other Covid survivors. Or that I am trying to figure out how to get to The Greens safely, given that I can barely walk the length of a city block without resting.
He tells me that he will check in again later, but he doesn’t. I don’t hear from him again till his keys jingle in the lock a full hour after he told me he’d be home. Immediately I get up and start toward him—I’m not even using Candis, just cruising on the furniture when I need a little extra support, and I want to show him—but before I can reach him he holds out his hand like a stop sign. He proceeds to strip off his clothes and stuff them into a laundry bag that he’s wedged underneath the table by the door where we keep our phones and keys and wallets. When he’s wearing only his boxers and a surgical mask, he edges past me in the hallway. “Just let me rinse off,” he says.
Five minutes later he reappears, dressed and smelling of soap, his hair still wet. I am in the kitchen, awkwardly dragging a Clorox wipe along the wax paper of the two deli sandwiches he’s brought home. I wonder if we will all die from ingesting cleaning solutions.
I scrub my hands thoroughly and bring the plates to the table. Finn immediately takes a giant bite and groans. “First thing I’ve eaten since this morning.”
“So I shouldn’t ask how your day was.”
He glances at me. “This is the best part of it,” he says. “What did you do?”
“Skydiving,” I tell him. “Then a little light lion taming.”
“Underachiever.” His face lights up. “Wait. I have something for you.”