If you find yourself confined to a room because you’ve finally caught COVID, I have some ideas for you on what to do! It would be a relief to finally get it over with, if I had the mild version of Covid, which I do not. I have the version where you only want soft things to touch your skin and your hair and teeth hurt and you have an on again off again fever that messes with your mind.

I have found I am lucky in many regards; my husband is (so far) negative and can bring snacks, and there is a bathroom off the bedroom with both a tub and a shower, offering me two ways to clean off!

Fist thing, get comfortable.  As your skin may hurt for no apparent reason, try just wearing soft socks and a camisole. Yup. That’s it. No one can see your nakedness so why not relish in the freedom of bare down there? You might have a massive coughing fit in the bathroom and accidentally pee on the floor. That can happen. Good thing there is no one there to see!

If you get cold put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt and climb under fifteen blankets. In approximately 30 minutes you might start to hallucinate about a sleepover in 6th grade that had a bunch of girls playing “light as a feather, heavy as a stone.” (Basically, it’s when girls try to put someone in a trance-like state and lift them with two fingers, carrying them like a floating sarcophagus through a basement while parents are happily passed out upstairs.) I had this memory and was like, what the shit, girls love witchcraft don’t they, and then remembered my kids won’t have done this because they’ve turned off all their creative ghoulish instincts with phones.

Shiver for a while, climb out of the nightmare/memory and shed clothing. Repeat. 

Go through the bathroom and find face care products that you haven’t used in forever. Find one that says wrinkles will lift in five days! Slather it on your face and neck and say, we’ll see, bitch! to no one in particular.

Find you have a particular three feet of the bed that you hoard like someone might come and take it away. Remind yourself there is no one in the room to steal your pillow fortress or blankets so you can use the whole bed if you want, talk it over with yourself but come to the agreement that these three feet of the bed are all you need in life. And the soft pillow, your new best friend.

Find a dead wood bug in the bathroom one day, you’ve been here for days now so when did it swing by for a visit? So sad you didn’t get to have a conversation. You can try counting the legs but will probably give up, that’s ok. Say a few words before chucking it into the toilet, like what a good friend he was and always there for you, because why not, you aren’t doing anything else. Realize you still have one close friend, the pillow.

You could talk to actual friends on the phone, but the energy required to do that seems like the part in that astronaut movie with Sandra Bullock, where she conjures dead George Clooney to tell her how to move a space capsule with directions written in another language. The energy required is too much. Just text “I have a lot of snot” instead.

This is too much actually. I will be back after a three-hour nap. I find that is the approximate reloading time for energy required to look at cat videos. Or train wrecks. Somehow my phone has decided I need to look at high speed trains derailing. It is trying to tell me something about my life. Fuck you too, phone. 

Ok, T.V. time. Try watching cheesy movies. Ultimately you might find them unsatisfying. Instead, try watching an entire season of Ozark in your blanket fortress on your phone, realizing your life is pretty good, in comparison? Now you’re feeling a bit better about yourself, right? We all gotta have things to feel good about.

The stack of books? The writing you should be doing? No. Nothing makes sense. This, I’m sure, wont’ make any sense. Words float around and disconnect and now you know what it must be like for people who can’t read. Have a little cry for those people and then realize you have a fever again.

You can also spend some time coughing and blowing your nose. Or staring at a dark streak on the wall above a plug, thinking, that can’t be good. You can try to exercise your muscles by doing pushups against the sink but on three your muscles might almost give out, and if you like your teeth, don’t do this. It was a close call. Just turn to lard instead.

Take a selfie of your puffy face up close so you look exactly like a potato head. Send it to the one friend you know won’t put it on the internet but may use it for your profile picture. They will send you one too. They also have covid from a different source. You are effed together.

I think I’ve almost run out of things to do. I’ve thought about cleaning. For exercise, I changed the sheets. It was tiring. That’s where I’m at. 

I do not recommend having a bag of dried mangos in the room for snacks. I am reminded of Stella’s Four-Year-Old Flapper Outfit Fiasco which involved one trip to the walk-in, and a very fast trip out after she exploded (all over the floor). I think the exact phrase I used to my husband was “How many of those things did she eat?” 

Have crackers, instead.

Ok, was that helpful? You can do some staring, some shivering, some mango-induced crapping, after that take a bath, put some clothes on (or not) and find tv that makes you feel like you’re a winner. You can count the number of faces you find hiding in the bathroom floor tile, which can be exciting during the fever phase. You can pull out all your chin hairs. That’s all I’ve got for ideas. I’m going to go talk to my pillow now. It is such a nice friend, so comforting. So soft. Goodnight.