in my fatigue and pain I couldn’t find the words to make myself legible to others. (And I still have not found them. This text is full of silences and vagueness and lacunae: when I write “brain fog,” I imagine that your mind slides over the idea, unless you, too, have suffered from it.)

To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need.

Elsewhere, while COVID-19 may have abated from peak hellish weirdness, the narratives that collapsed then have not been put back together again