My days of not having COVID for two years and not even getting a single alert from the COVID-19 app are over. If the system allowed it, I would have been an alert on someone else’s phone.

Having this disease now, I can attest to its weirdness. I don’t know; maybe it was weird because I had recently got my third dose before getting sick. Oh, that third shot, which I have carefully planned so that it wouldn’t mess up my menstrual cycle again, was just on time for me to socialize again in March/April. A side note: the second dose was brutal, and I don’t give a frak what averages presented in articles tell you or what you “believe”. It HAD an effect on my cycle, PERIOD!

So with my maximum protection on, I plan to meet people, go to restaurants, take art classes. Life is almost back to normal. Then out of the blue, who knows from where I get COVID. So much for carefully planning the booster shot. The disease starts with a headache on Sunday, escalates into a sore throat in the evening. I hope it’s a canker sore on my tonsils, but I can’t spot any. Monday, work from home, rapid test negative. Tuesday, still hurts, and yeah, I am sick rapid test negative. Tuesday evening, it escalates; I spike a fever and have chills running down my spine. Wednesday, clearly indicates I am sick, sore throat is horrible. Wednesday evening, my ears are clogged, can’t hear much. Rapid test finally POSITIVE. Thursday, no fever, fever, then no fever again, sore throat gets worse, then ears are clogged again. What’s up with these evenings that things get much worse.

Given everything one hears about the disease, I am probably dodging a bullet and going through a moderate version of this disease. The only weirdness is that it took four days to be fully sick (nevermind that the quarantine rules say to isolate for five days after the first symptom onset. Kidding, right? ). Even if it’s a moderate version, I should say it sucks. After trying to socialize more often than a monthly night out, I should be mad that I was hit by this bad luck of getting sick. But that’s not what sucks the most right now.

I was at a place in my life I had a lot to share with a dear friend of mine. I remember the first day we have talked. The days I was still navigating making friends in a foreign land, wondering what I should do with all the time I have in my hands with not much money to spend (student life). It was those days that this delicate woman talked to me. She told me to sit next to her, and I think she asked my name and where I was from to validate. She has been the most supportive friend I have ever had. Unfortunately, I haven’t been in my best form for a long time, and my support for her was limited: Whatever I could scrape for from my world, which was turning upside down.

This past month I was reaching a point where things were settling down for me; I was getting calmer, learning what drains my energy, what replenishes it. I wasn’t healed completely. I don’t think I will ever heal to a hundred percent. You see, I had just to set up a ladder for the days I needed it. I wanted to share all of that with her because I knew she was the person that could relate to it. I wanted to share the weirdness of this disease and how I have made a plan for myself for the third shot because I know myself best, and it doesn’t matter if it’s superstition from everyone else’s point of view. I also wanted to tell her about this extremely regular date I have been to. I wanted to say, “We talked for six h, can you imagine? To another human being I have talked to, for six h.”  and perhaps hear her make a few jokes about it. I wanted her to join me in my anger about the Turkish currency and how much guilty it makes me feel about buying stuff when I know that thing costs equal to my sister’s rent.

I can’t share all of this and more with her right now, which sucks. Because she has a war that makes her worry, that takes all of her joy, that destroys the life of her friends and family. The war destroys the memories she has collected and prevents her from forming new ones with a narrative she would like to have. The war overshadows everything. There are no winners in war. Everyone loses. Some lose their humanity, others their life.

It sucks that I am selfishly thinking about the fact that I cannot share my life with her under the circumstances instead of focusing my energy on how to support her. It sucks that all the ways I can think of supporting her is lame. It sucks that I live a life forward here while she is probably trying to turn the clock back to a time before the war. It sucks that we were forced to a different chapter in our lives that goes beyond living on different continents, like being physically separate wasn’t difficult enough.

I started the post wanting to end it with “seeing humans never ends well” given the recent infection that I am still suffering through. It was going to be a fun post, I was going to joke about socialization. But while writing all that, I kept thinking about my friend that all the other stuff didn’t matter anymore. So instead, I will finish with: only idiots talk about winners of war, there has never been one, and there will never be.

Now time for bed to get some sleep so I can at least fight against this disease that develops a new symptom every 24h and has given me insomnia even if I cannot end the other wars.