FEAR…
My Mind has been on my mind
When the pandemic started, I self-quarantined because of my age.
I was once given 6 months to live in 2008 for incurable heart disease. So I wasn’t taking any chances. I remember sitting on my tiny patio in Istanbul watching the ships move along the Bosphorus Strait. My boyfriend had just delivered cases of water and diet cokes to me. It was April of 2020. He said to me, “This pandemic should be over by the summer.” I never said I word, but I thought maybe it would be over the summer of 2021.
We were both wrong.
The word I’ve been searching for was ‘fear.’
I was paranoid about getting sick. Especially after being exposed in May of 2019 when my boyfriend got sick, his parents and his brother all had Covid-19. His father died. Then a few months later a close friend of mine — my only female friend in Istanbul — died. I’d also been with her a couple of days before she went to the hospital.
What am I afraid of?
I’ve had 4 vax\s, I’m in great health. But in spite of all that, I definitely lost my equilibrium. And although I finished writing 3 books during the last 2 years, I hadn’t been able to write for the last fourteen months. But in the last 3 weeks, I began again.
