I tested positive for Covid on Sunday, my first time. The last of my family to get it, nearly five years into this global panny-D in which we find ourselves, I thought I was doing the tests wrong.

I’d been run-down since Thursday. Cortland Street was closed to traffic for the first time but I missed Halloween. On Saturday afternoon I could only ride my bike as far as Potrero del Sol, to look at the Day of the Dead altars and the squares of the AIDS quilt in the crisp autumn sun. Marigolds and grief. I cried for the lost boys who should have been my queer elders.

By Saturday night my temperature was 100.6 and it took some effort to breathe. When I finally called my doctors on Sunday, wheezing, they sent me to the emergency room. In the friendly robot taxi I wept for the people who went to the ER with Covid in 2020, and who said goodbye to their families through iPads, and who died. Me, I had x-rays which ruled out pneumonia, was given paxlovid and all the steroids and came home to quarantine in the attic.

Election day is a more reliable trauma trigger even than the week in which both my parents died. I spent the morning text banking in Michigan, then I howled all through therapy, deep, racking sobs for all that we have lost. Afterwards the cats insisted on taking me out into the garden, where the linnets and phoebes and hummingbirds and crows had various constructive things to say.

I took portraits of the sticky monkeyflower and hummingbird sage and Douglas iris. I chatted to my sister in outback NSW. I scrubbed out the bird-feeder with hot water and soap. That’s about all I had in me, and now I’m back in my college kid’s bed, looking over Excelsior and San Bruno Mountain as the sun sets into the Pacific. May all beings know peace.