My ex-girlfriend Carmen called yesterday to see how I was feeling. I told her that the symptoms were mild but it was the lack of interest in anything, and the duration, which surprised me. I said that within the last six months to a year I had written here how serenely happy I was to be living my retirement with enough money, enough interest in the world to still engage and learn, enough of everything. My quality of life was excellent. 

And then I heard myself tell her that I wouldn't want to live the rest of my life with this COVID quality of life--I quickly added that I was not suicidal, that I would live with COVID life if that was my lot, but that that was a depressing thought; that I could not have written in these past two weeks that I was serenely content. 

Do we ever get back to pre-COVID levels of wellness? I really wanted to know the answer to that and googled it a couple of times. There is no answer, it varies from person to person, which is bleak. This is such a confounding virus, vaguely familiar in its outlines but disturbing in the details, and it so new that we don't know what we don't know. Days like this make me feel that I will get back to my pre-normal, but on days like the last two, I was bleak about that.