When I first saw the cover for, She’s Come Undone, at my best friend’s house, sometime in high school, I could not get it out of my mind. Maybe it was because it had a woman’s disconnected head floating in the bright blue heavens between two similarly disintegrating clouds. Maybe it was because I’d never heard that phrase before—to come undone. Maybe it was because “coming undone” felt strangely reflective of my own human experience and simultaneously like a terrible fate to be avoided. I should admit that despite all the staring at that book in the kitchen, on the sofa, under the swing—all around my home away from home, I have never opened the book, and I do not even know what it is about. The cover haunted me enough all on its own. Maybe that isn’t saying much. I am, after all, easily haunted.

 I got Covid in the Fall of 2020. That was back when 6 months into the pandemic seemed like a looooong time. And actually, it was a long time for a rule-following, doctor-avoiding, super-extrovert like me. It was a lot of walking and weeping and waiting on the porch to see friends – at a distance, week after week, month after month. I bought a “social distancing stick” on the internet during that first stretch of time. For this, I was summarily and deservedly mocked. I get it. It was a six-foot, silver, retractable pole for which I paid $15.00. I was mostly in on the joke, but there was great comfort in having something so precise within my grasp at all times. The pandemic has illuminated many things, but one of the more unexpected is the nearly universal inability of humans to accurately estimate the distance between two people.

physically,

 and metaphysically.

 This is a depressing revelation.

 I did what most everyone else in my privilege bracket did during that first few months of social isolation. I got some weekly calls on the calendar with old friends, attended the occasional zoom party, watched “Love at First Sight," and cleaned out my cabinets. I figured out how to do my job in a new medium, with new rules and no contact. And I read frantically about the latest guidelines, protocols, demographics, and deaths.

 I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to Covid while I was out of town on one of the two “calculated-risk” trips I allowed myself to take during that first 6 months. My exposure was confirmed on the drive back to my house in Waco, so thankfully, I was able to avoid engaging with anyone for the 10-day isolation period that was required at that time. Less thankfully, this also meant that I knew I was exposed before any symptoms came on, so I was left to wait and to wonder which fate would befall me each day, in my house, by myself.

 Lying in bed alone at home can be scary sometimes as a woman, even without the worry of any percolating potentially life-threatening disease within you. I have lived by myself for a decade or so, and despite all the tree-rattling, wind gusts, animals in the attic, shadows, sirens, and shots that have set my heart racing over the years, nothing has ever been quite as frightening as those evenings in September when I lay wishing I knew what this intruder was doing inside of the body I had done so much to defend,  protect, and insulate all the years of my life.

 Each night, I checked my oxygen.

I took my temperature. I

texted the small group of people that knew that I was sick to say that I was ok.

Then I gathered the armfuls of tissue out of my bed from the last 24 hours and got under the covers to keep watch.

There was something cloudy developing in my chest. I could feel it growing the first few nights and then eventually just sitting there, staying stuck. I racked my brain to remember the evolution of every cold I’d ever had. Had anything ever set up camp in my chest quite like this? Was the presence I was feeling in my lungs? Was it fluid around my heart? Was it a foreign body that had always been present but was now somehow emboldened to expand its territory with the help of Corona? I said half-assed prayers to what felt like a half-assed god and hoped people wouldn’t go through my personal belongings if I perished.

 The truth is, I wasn’t very sick at all. I was well enough to work most of each day. In the “before times," I would have presumed this was a sinus infection and went about my life. Now, instead,  I was replaying each and every decision that led me here, finding what fault I could claim to ensure that this nightmare had all been perfectly within my control—avoidable if not for some error on my part.

I shouldn’t have gone to visit friends.

I should have left, packed my bags, and headed home, giving myself the best chance as soon as I suspected there were germs afoot.

I should have worked harder all the years prior to be prettier or sweeter or generally less large.  

Then at least, I might not be worrying and wondering alone.

 Which, of course, I wasn't.

 I am rich in relationships. Wealthy even, I would say. I am Oprah-level resourced when it comes to intimate connections. Several people offered not only to bring me things to leave at a distance but also to take the risk to come in to be with me. And I didn’t even tell all of my closest friends, so I know there were others who would have done the same. So, just to be perfectly clear, I never had a fever or low oxygen. No chills, no loss of taste and smell. No shortage of love and affection or literally anything.

But,

 I could not stop thinking about why and how this had happened to me, a lifelong risk avoider. I was furious, mostly with myself as far as I could tell. “The thing is, I told my therapist, “I know that I don’t get to have the freedom that other people do. It is cute to go around acting like we are all one and that we have the same perils lurking for us in the shadows, but that is a fiction that we perform for one another so that we can all sleep at night. It isn’t the way things really are. Deep down, I know that every day, I have more and different dangers to consider than my white and my male friends and family do. I do not have faith that doctors will see me with as much humanity as my white loved ones, especially not if I am unconscious and unable to charm them into treating me right. I do not have evidence that my politicians will represent my best interests if they do not incidentally align with their current strategy to maintain their power.”

 She listened as I listed all the reasons I have for my hypervigilance and assured me that all of those things were true. I love this about her. She does not try to convince me that race-based fears are pessimism or delusion. She knows better. She is a black woman too. What she did suggest was that perhaps what I was describing was not grief over my own perceived misbehavior but rather lament for the loss of a just world that never existed but that I had believed in for more years than most.

 I knew that she was right about this. What I did not know is how one lives with the conscious awareness that things are not fair, have never been, and cannot even be manipulated into being so. It seemed to me like this truth required me to choose between naivete and nihilism. If I picked naivete, I would have to spend the rest of my life continuing to act as though good behavior resulted in divine protection. I would have to continue to fashion more and more ways to self-correct, self-discipline, and self-hate in order to let the world remain good.  If I went with nihilism, I'd have to pretend to believe that existence is meaningless, which, to be honest, I just don’t think I am cut out for. I am not without a poet’s dark edges, but at the end of the day, I’m peppy. I have the pluck of a person who believes in something, even if that something is elusive.

 I wandered around my mind and the world like a mad woman trying to figure out how to get found when I felt so lost. What would it mean to embrace the truth of the world without escaping it? I asked people as they entered and left my home. What does one do with an unjust world? What do you do? What should I do? What can be done?!?!

 If there is nothing I can do to keep myself from falling ill or to save my family or the world with good deeds and childlike faith and if I don't have the constitution for hedonistic disregard, please tell me, what are my next steps? This resulted in a lot of blank faces and a lot of good conversations too. And at a certain moment, probably when I was alone, probably when I was watering a plant under my care who might or might not make it, the answer—an answer—came to me. The alternative between naivete and nihilism is…

 Mystery.

I tend to my plants each day, never knowing what they will produce or if they will even make it in the harsh Texas conditions. Sometimes I am a phenomenal plant parent giving equal energy and attention to all of them, and still, one dies. Sometimes I am a bad plant parent, and I forget to water or rotate the one around the corner out of sight and mind, and it turns out to be the healthiest living being in my whole yard. Everything does not happen as it "should," but neither are my efforts futile.

When it first became apparent that I was getting sick after having been exposed to Covid, I reached out to my friend Carrie, one of the gentler, deeper souls that I know. "I'm just so mad that I've worked so hard to take care of my body only to betray it like this.” And she reminded me that all of that work would rise to meet me now, all the walks and workouts and water, all the sunshine and sobriety, the intimacy, and the therapy might not have kept me from getting sick, but they almost certainly made it easier for me to heal. I wanted the world to be just, yes, and if not just, then at least beatable, and it isn’t quite either of those things. That’s what finally sent me spiraling to the center of myself almost two Septembers ago. But there is something mystical about the way that beauty keeps holding hands with sorrow, year after year, decade after decade, and as I have learned to accept them both for what they are, I get more practiced at relinquishing the illusion of control over my life—prayer by prayer, practice by practice, plant by miraculous little plant.

 When I first heard of undoing, it seemed frightening to me.

 Undone as in disassembled, chaotic, broken.

 But there is another way to define coming apart, isn't there?

 Undone like a shoelace, tenderly released of one knot after the other

  until the wearer can walk again.

 Undone like a kite string finally set right,

  so the flyer can fly again.

 And, of course,

 Undone like a woman,

 not one taken apart without her consent,

but rather like a woman letting go

 of anything

 that binds.