Control: Reflections on Two Months Lost…

I, Dalton Lewis, lost two months of my life recently to several problems. The first problem was that people started to die from a super psycho death virus called Covid-19, or the coronavirus. I went to the Warhammer store in Libertyville and everyone thought, oh, it would be fine, nothing bad would happen, we’d be fine. The president said, we’d be fine. We told ourselves that it was mostly in China. We told ourselves that no one we knew could get hurt. The problem was —

I might die.

I’m fat. I’m three hundred pounds fat. I’m forty-two years old. Either of those factors could easily kill me. Both are a bad combination. Suddenly I couldn’t leave the house. I was trapped, in my home, against my will, for a significant period of time. Life imprisoned me for my fatness and my age. Life said, sit there, don’t leave the home, don’t talk to anyone else, and eat only food made at your own home. Outside factors confined me to my room for most of my time and my home for the rest.

My parents might die.

They will die eventually, right? Everyone dies eventually. Sometime, if I live long enough, I will have to go without parents. I will have to make it on my own. I know that will happen. My dad has Parkinson’s and is old and might die from Covid-19. My mom is healthier but still old enough to be at extreme risk. We have to watch out for the virus. They have full lives, but they’ve lived and had countless different experiences. They’ve had enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if they died.

I sat, in my room, watching movies over and over. I played the same video games on and again. I sat there, drinking zero sugar soda, pretending that the fake sugar was better for me than the real sugar. I played the same games over and over from the prime of my life, ignoring the new games and the new systems.

Something else happened, too. I switched medications because I’m stupid. I took fewer meds because I wanted to lose weight and didn’t think that I could lose weight while taking the anti-psychotics I was taking. I lost time to that, too. I didn’t get any writing done for two months. I sat there, unable to read or write, unable to function, unable to process anything, being punished for something and not knowing what that was.

The world stopped. Reality said, I’m locking you up and containing you, and I’m probably taking your job away and maybe costing you a lot of money. It indicated that your loved ones might die. It indicated that we don’t have the control over our world that we thought we did. We thought that our precious technologies would save us from anything, and we were wrong. We couldn’t even protect ourselves from a disease transmitted from a bat to a human in China — somehow.

We missed two months in which things could have happened. We stopped having movie theaters playing movies. We stopped eating at restaurants. We stopped most sporting events. We didn’t do enough to make ourselves immune to this condition. We lost two months, sitting in our little homes, hoping for a cure that wouldn’t show up.

Thanks, and take care, friends.