iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The fluid keeps gathering in ears where no one else can see it. The groups keep posting stories that call aggression righteous. The girl keeps going as if nothing about her has changed. The nurse is still calmly waiting for the callback from the doctor.

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She does not ask what else arrived in that same season. The day stays ordinary. Cars pass. Someone drops a belonging outside a store. The blood has already been cleaned.

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Later I stand behind a girl who says she developed Hashimoto's in the last two years. She shrugs, as if naming a change in weather, no trigger she can blame. The diagnosis sits lightly on her because she is still learning what the days will require.

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By late morning the posts sharpen aggressively with every share. No one in those threads mentions the Covid waves I believe makes people irritable and quick to strike. They only notice the sudden willingness to wound.

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Over the weekend a local attorney was arrested, and the details move faster on social media than any official account can correct. Within hours the local groups fill with angry names and accusations. People who haven't spoken in years are suddenly certain of one another's motives.

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The other said both ears hurt and were full, sealed from the inside with pressure. She keeps her voice level while she waits for the doctor to call back. I leave and the day goes on as if nothing has stirred.

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Inside my appointment, the nurse speaks of her own children in the careful way people use when they don't want a private worry to become something larger. One woke with blood on the pillow, bright, then cleaned away before school.

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That is exactly what it looks like the morning a child wakes bleeding from the ear. This is how this kind of erasure always begins.

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Outside the trees still hold their leaves as October doesn't strip them here yet. The parking lot looks ordinary under a low, dark grey overcast, the kind of day that looks like nothing is happening at all.

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Until genetics and Covid are taken all the way seriously, I will not take the other stories seriously again. It is a slow clearing of a portion of us, while the rest live free, and laugh, and mock the dead.

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15 waves have moved through this house. Some of us are chosen and some are spared, and the spared keep the clocks. The illness does not argue. It simply repeats.

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Still forever onwards the alarm set for 5:30, still the school run and work, still the dishes and laundry and wiping of noses that are not mine. Miss any of it and the word is lazy. Or overreacting.

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For 6 days my resting heart has climbed. It stutters when I bend, and sometimes when I am perfectly still. Every joint is lit. I close my hand and the knuckles answer in pain. Heat moves through me without reason. A hand sits on the crown of my head and squeezes. I am dazed. My energy is spent.

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I have been sinking since the turn. This morning he said, “I thought you would be over it after a good night’s rest.” One night. That is the whole mercy allowed.

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Day Nine. It arrived quiet, almost polite. On day 6 it turned and took the house by the throat. My child burned through it in 2 days and woke clear. My spouse never felt it. My mother, under the same roof, never felt it.

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The last rays thin, color drains from the windshield, and before it is fully gone the cough begins again. Trauma remembers first. The loop does not ever end.

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Six years we have been trapped inside a loop with no door. Until the people who share your air decide it is real and worth resisting, the waves repeat.

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On the sixth day, a headache settled at the top of my skull like a squeezing hand that will not lift. Nausea rising inside my chest. Riding home in that same hour of light fading, he said he had to be sick. I panicked and handed him the bag. Six episodes of vomiting through the night.

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I went home and the day ended early. That night my heart raced and skipped, my ears filled as if I had slipped underwater, heat moved through me in flashes, my stomach clenched slow and low.

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A few days later instructing my circuit class, a gravity well dropped through me. Arms and legs turned to lead. The air I breathed in narrowed to a straw. I kept my voice steady and counted all six intervals while my body negotiated with an old enemy it has known for over six years.

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For days it came in rare, brief bursts while he ran through the house playing. Another throat cleared in the house and called it nothing. 2/6 cats sneezed into corners and slept longer than usual.

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I knew that sound before I turned my head. My heart had already leapt ahead, knowing what had crossed the threshold again.

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Trauma remembers first. The loop does not ever end. The cough arrived six days ago on the drive home as the sun was setting. Low, wet, and rattling. As if something had nested in his chest and waited for the last light to curdle and slide off the road before it announced itself.

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I have been watching the same signs since the start. The times keep lifting them, one after another, patient and unblinking, until my hour is over and the door closes behind them and the air we all just shared is left to settle in the dark.

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I cannot quite remember when everyone stopped seeing these signs. Or if they ever did. A Covid wave has moved through again and most people still do not know they are in it. I do.

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She laughed while she held the sign. That is how they hold them now. Casually. Politely. The way people used to ask how your day was.

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A little pantomime of down, up, a rocking stagger, her body catching itself a half second too late. Dizziness that arrives when you stand too fast. Another mark the waves leave on people who still make it to class.

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🪧 3. On the way out the door I waved to the sisters who have been coming for a few weeks. One of them told me, almost giddily, that every so often when she went down and stood back up in the workout she “feels very woozy.” She showed me.

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thanked her for coming and told her I would see her next time. The sign was already written across the whites of her eye, held up in the ordinary light, polite as a wave goodbye.

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🪧 After my second class a woman came up and said she enjoyed it, that she would be back.When she turned her head I saw her eye,the clear membrane over the white of it,threaded with vessels that had gone dilated,full and red.An inflammatory flush I have learned to spot across a studio during a wave.

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I have heard that correction since the beginning. The insistence and little hand gesture near the face. She needed to call it something ordinary before she left. So she held the sign up herself, then turned it so the safe side faced the class.

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She then added, as if the sentence needed a second lock, “It’s just allergies though, so I’ll be back.”

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🪧 A woman stopped on her way out of my first class. She lifted both hands to her face and drew a circle around her sinuses, her mouth pulled into a scrunch. “I’m fighting bad allergies,” she said. “It’s taking the life out of me. So I’m not staying for the second class.”

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🪧 Signs of the Times Look around. Listen. The times are already holding up the same signs they hold up every Covid wave.

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The coughs settled into the background noise the way traffic noise does, until nobody turned their head. Covid was no longer something that has entered. It is just the noise the world makes now, as if it always had.

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Behind us, coughing echoed down the hall until it became just another sound in the building. Exercise continued. Casual conversations went onwards. The receptionist kept clicking. No one paused.

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I had heard the same story a few days earlier from someone who blamed her office chair. Same sudden pain, and the exact same certainty it was nothing more than furniture.

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I walked out after teaching and a woman followed me, telling me about the bursitis in her hip from the flight home from New York last week. A steroid shot took it away, she said. She blamed the airplane seat.

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It happens every time the Covid wave crests and retreats. The room goes hollow. Everyone pulls far back inside their own body. Some look tortured. Most just look gone, their souls slipped out, leaving the rest to finish the class on autopilot.

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Tonight I looked around my class and every face was empty. Not tired the way people get after a long day of work, but emptied. Eyes half open, limbs still moving. Yet, nobody is home inside. It felt as if something had already come through and taken the part that makes a person present.

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I do not believe there is a way out of this. The denial is not a surface to be argued off of. It is sewn into the way they account for their health, their jobs, and their children. They are fully immersed. The larger picture has been made unthinkable.

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Denial is the permanent lighting they live under. It keeps each story small enough to inhabit, and together they form a world in which Covid is never required.

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They connect every dot except the one that would make the full picture visible. Their lives are arranged so that dot never has to appear, so the picture never has to be seen.

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The pneumonia is from a supplement. The new hip pain is from the office chair she has sat in for 20 years. The sick days were already spent on the child, so the cough goes to work. The mask is the unbearable part.

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nose dripping everywhere, having to blow it every 20 seconds. Oh no. That is hell." This is what a Covid wave sounds like.

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"I can only use my days off for my kid," she said. "I run out when I get sick. I have to go to work anyway. Just coughing it up in there." She shook her head. "There is no way I could wear a mask if I was sick again. I'd be coughing all day,

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Between classes a client told me she spent her PTO last week on her sick daughter, then got sick herself. She works for a dermatologist.

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