Covid, you have shaped our lives, nay, our world, for these past thirtyfour nights. Thirty fortnights I mean, damnit! Covid, you have shaped our world for these past thirty fortnights. Man, woman and child-person all tremble in fear of you. You make us wear masks, but yet you reveal so much about us. Our fears, our doubts, our dreams. Our deepest desires! Our desire to be rid of you, our desire to be free, our desire to once again sneeze without having it disgustingly cling to the inside of our masks like a spider’s web. A web of desire indeed.
We also desire to know you! Covid, too small, too silent to be known. COVID WHAT ARE YOU?!1 While we do not know you in your true form, we have all met you in some way. Man, woman, and child-creature all innately try to bring familiar form to the unknown. To death: the grim reaper. To the peanut: Mr. Peanut.
So Covid, my dear rival, my tormentor, I present this treatise on you and your true form, which you surely cannot read (you being but a germ or a snot or something,) but is perhaps a shout into the void of hopelessness and despair. For while you are surely a microscopic snot disease that cannot understand human emotion, to us you have been so much more.
Covid is a swarm of bees, stinging the honey that is our sweet souls. Wait, no bees make honey. Shit. Ok. Covid is the honey, made by bees, which are whatever Covid came from, and it provides us with sweet, sweet sadness. Fuck, that one is even worse. Ok, I gotta get away from the bee thing. Hard restart.
Covid is an April Fool’s prank gone horribly wrong. Ok, this is going better already. Covid is an April Fool’s prank, and the prank is a bag of bugs, but after everyone laughs about the bugs, the bugs are still everywhere. Bug City USA. Yes, Covid is Bug City USA. But also it’s really bad in China first, then Italy, then Brazil. Covid is a big bag of bugs moving around the world in what is undoubtedly the world’s worst April Fool’s prank ever played by none other than God himself. The joke is on all of us and the only solution is pest control or some cats to eat the bugs. And the cats are the vaccine? No, that was better than the bee ones, but I think it’s not quite there. It is too silly, Covid is definitely not light-hearted. Maybe I should stay away from bugs all together. I need a human emotional connection for this to work and people don’t have that with bugs. I need a more relatable animal.
Ok, I think I’ve got it. Covid is a stray dog, a sad looking stray dog that you invite in and give some table scraps because it looks hungry. Now that it knows that you have food, it won’t leave. It bites you and your family and now you have Covid and are also sad looking stray dogs. Zombie dogs! Covid is a stray zombie dog.
No, that isn’t right. Maybe it’s a pack of dogs? A pack of wild dogs! That’s good, it evokes a lot more emotion.Too furry, though. Covid is a hairless beast for certain. Ok, here goes: Covid is a man with alopecia. An uninvited dinner guest, with alopecia and a wig, so you think he’s just any other man. Maybe you think he’s someone’s date they’ve brought to the dinner party, until you realize he doesn’t know who to sit next to. Then he takes his wig off and it’s too late. While you were feasting on deviled eggs, he was feasting on your naivete and licked all the forks, and now your harmless dinner party is a super spreader event. Yes, that is Covid!
No, that one doesn’t seem right either. I think that Covid is less tangible than that. It isn’t really a man at all. Perhaps, more of a feeling. Yes, that’s better! Covid is the feeling you get, the feeling inside all of us. Yes, Covid is like the feeling you have when you are coughing and have a high fever and difficulty breathing. You have all of this because of a deadly virus that has entered your body. That is definitely Covid.
A Man Eating Chicken 