The waters are rising, seeping in through the floorboards, leaking through the copper pipes, lapping at the porch door. The flood is coming – as I sleep the sleep of the ill, infirm and indisposed – on a gloomy and dank day in the biting mid-winter season of Covid.
It feels like the usual suspect, a familiar foe, with a twist of bitter lemon, or a sporing seed of anthrax poison. The second wave of the second wave. This time its personal. A battle of minds, lungs and hearts.
I am sleeping with the fear and shadows of failure. Last night I wrapped myself up in its dark grey duvet covers, woke with its beaded cold sweat on my brow.
And as I lie here, it is flooding in through the cemented walls, carrying the overdue utility bills and junk mail across the lounge floor. Rising. Always rising.
The fear of failure began with the dream, while the tiny Covid daggers stabbed at my abdomen and chest, freezing my body to the cold bone marrow, in the cool night breeze coming from the crack in the bedroom window.
I woke bolt upright to a dream of a watercourse running through the house, moving furniture in whirlpools, eddies and currents. And I felt the FEAR of FAILURE: of failing my people, my family; of failing to pay these towering bills; of failing health and mental stamina; and of failing life in all its complex layers, disguises and conundrums.
And so, I lie here under the duvet. Willing sleep. Willing a way out from this wretched state, of my wracked body and mind.
And as the waters rise, I feel a moody dose of the lonesome blues, left for hours alone with the Virus, to contemplate personal hell and high waters.
Existing in a fragile state of cold contemplation. Taking the allotted time to decode individual hair strands of DNA, for spurious answers to Life’s handed deck of fate, all its poker card and roulette wheel moments, and grisly rolled out and well-trodden red casino carpet.
After several short shot-gun days and even longer fitful nights of foreboding later – the murky flood waters have receded, the tiny Covid daggers have eased up, and the emotional whirlpools of turbulence calmed – and I am upright in bed watching a streaming documentary on near-death experiences.
I am a troubled bed bystander: to a climber falling down a sheer Himalayan mountain face in a blissful warm embrace and surviving; to a physician who died for half an hour in a Chilean kayaking accident and witnessed a multi-verse of light and colour; and a mother who died in childbirth and watched the whole tragedy on the winged shoulders of her surgeons, only to find her way back to her flatlined body and draw breath.
A cold tiny tear weaves its way down my face, and with it a passing thought of all the people in hospitals, care homes and residential homes passing over, lungs, hearts and minds failing. And I think how we all have the same collective fear of drowning in the rising flood waters of these times.