“If I were you guys, I would just live life normally. I mean, you’re college students! You should be doing what you want.”
My aunt sat on my couch, speaking animatedly to her son and me, waving her arms around to punctuate her statement. I glance at my mom, looking for a sign on how she wants me to react. She slightly shakes her head, and so I just turn to my aunt and give her a tight smile. I love her, but there are times I think that living outside the United States for the past ten years in the middle of nowhere has skewed her perception of politics a little — and this is one of those times. Over pizza earlier, she told me that COVID was created in a lab as a form of biological warfare against the United States.
Mom’s sister and her kids are visiting from Washington DC, where they have been quarantining. In a month, this conversation replays in my head as her son is prematurely sent home from UNC from kids “living life normally.” My aunt continues to theorize about the origins of COVID while Sting’s Greatest Hits played in the background. I glance at my cousin, trying to catch his eye to gauge his reaction. Usually, in these situations, we sneak away from our parents to catch-up and complain about the ridiculous things they bring up, but it looks like tonight we both just have to sit and listen. I decide to turn it into a drinking game — each time a new conspiracy is brought up, I take a drink of my wine. Maybe by 7:30, I will be too drunk to finish packing.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen, so later, as I finish packing my car, I think about how this will be my last night in St. Louis for a while. I am spending the rest of the summer in Ann Arbor, and in my head, it will be a needed reprieve from home. In my head, it will be precisely the thing I need.
—
That night, I play piano for hours, flipping through everything from Les Miserables to the Lumineers. I’m rusty — my fingers fumble chords and keys in songs I used to trust my hands to just know — and it strikes me that I won’t have access to a piano for another five months at the minimum, assuming I’m home for Thanksgiving. By then, my piano playing could be even worse.
I lean back and yell to my mom if she thought there was even a point to me keeping my piano books around when I would probably forget how to read music in a year anyway. She yells back, laughing, and says I am being dramatic. Suddenly I feel an unexpected pang in my stomach, a fleeting moment of nostalgia, for moments like this.
—
I stand in front of the espresso machine, brewing my first cup of coffee. After the first fills up, I pour the coffee into my industrial-sized tervis I stole from my sister. The third and last cup of scalding hot coffee splashes on my palm as I spill it down the side of the tervis, and I bite my lip and squeeze my eyes shut in an effort to not accidentally yelp and wake my mom up.
As I complete one last sweep of the house for any straggling items, I shake my mom awake to tell her I’m leaving and say one final goodbye to my dogs and cat. After spending the last three and a half months waiting for the day I could go back to Ann Arbor, I find myself upset to be leaving. My stomach flips, and as I hug my mom, I feel myself become glassy-eyed. Part of me wonders if this would be one of the last times I would be leaving my home rather than a place I was just visiting. The early morning hours always make me slightly more dramatic than usual, and I attribute this thought to that.
The first three hours of my car ride are a mix between podcasts and silence. The road is empty and quiet. Driving out of St. Louis, past the Arch and into Illinois, the morning mist is still settling, and I watch the sky begin to turn pink. I shake off the earlier mood with growing excitement and quite literally drive into the sunrise towards Ann Arbor.
—
Six hours in, I have graduated from true crime and other daily podcasts and am presently belting out songs from a playlist my friend had made for me. The sun is out, warming my fingers as I grip the steering wheel. The road is clear and flat ahead of me, besides a few semi-trucks here and there, and I have finally been able to forget some of my earlier sadness.
Quickly, I am shocked out of my stupor by a buzz against my leg. And then another one. And then another one. Determined to ignore it until my next rest-stop, I figure that if it was important enough, whoever was incessantly texting me will call. So I turn up my music and ignore it.
Ten minutes later, the buzzing hasn’t stopped. With the road ahead of me empty, I risk a look down at my phone. Between the mess of messages from my home group chat, the only words that stood out to me are “positive for COVID.” Fuck.
“Siri, call Rose.”
The phone rings; my heart races. Voicemail. Calling again; eyes on the road, come on, you are operating a vehicle going 80 mph, voicemail again. My anxiety increases with each text message that pops up and each dial tone that goes unanswered.
I mentally catalog the days since I and a few of my friends decided to have a bonfire. Ok, Tuesday – right? And it was Tuesday now, a full week later. I would be fine, right? But what if I wasn’t, and shit now I’m two hours away from Ann Arbor headed towards a house with new people I could potentially be exposing on the slim chance that I’m positive. Do I turn around? Voicemail again. New text messages pop up that I can’t read because I remember I am currently operating a vehicle.
We’ll Meet Again by Johnny Cash croons in the background of my spiral. Keep smilin’ though, just like you always- unable to stand it anymore, I snap my music off. I don’t want to miss my phone ringing if Rose calls me back. The road is still empty in front of me still, stretching out before me as I nervously fiddle with my cruise control, anxiously switching it between 80 and 85 mph. Now an hour and a half out, my countdown to Ann Arbor turns to dread rather than excitement.
Rose calls me back.
—
I find myself sitting in the Ann Arbor Urgent Care waiting room, and my hands shake. This is the exact opposite of what I expected my entrance to Ann Arbor to be; instead of sitting on the porch catching up with my roommates, I’m sitting in an Urgent Care surrounded by other anxious potential COVID-carrier. After my call with Rose, I called my roommates in Ann Arbor to update them; they refused to let me drive the 8 hours back home. We decided on me quarantining in my room and masking up when I needed to cook or use the bathroom.
One of my friends had tested positive for COVID in St. Louis. They believed they came into contact with the virus after I had seen them, but there was no way to be sure, so here I am sitting in the corner of the Ann Arbor Urgent Care, fighting with their wifi to send my roommates a selfie of me trying to make light of the situation. I feel so stupid.
Back in the testing room, the nurses are friendly. Their eyes crinkle, and I can tell they’re smiling under their masks, trying to make me comfortable. I try to apologize for my higher than average blood pressure, explain that I just finished an 8-hour drive, feeling a need to justify myself over something that I can’t control. They just nod and ask me to sit back and prepare to breathe in and out as hard as possible. Up goes the swab, and wow, that is the weirdest feeling I have ever experienced. The swab feels like a mix of the feeling right before you let a sneeze go, and if you had water shot up your nose after diving to the bottom of a pool at the same time. It’s not as bad as people say it will be, but it’s certainly not better either.
I find myself thinking — is this what this year will be like? Just counting the good days in between exposures and tests? Since April, I’ve been building coming back to Ann Arbor in July to be an escape, a breath of fresh air from the monotony of home. I didn’t feel like myself at home, and I often found myself slipping back into the depressive cloak that hovered over me throughout high school. I wanted to feel like myself again, and in my head, I had made out Ann Arbor to be the cure. In a dramatic way — god, I hate proving my mom right — I found myself feeling like the nasal swap shocked my brain into reality.
On the way out the door, I put my hand under the automatic hand sanitizer dispenser and am struck by the smell of tequila. When I turn my car on, I jump as lyrics blast full volume — Keep smilin’ through, just like you always do — and I let it play. “We’ll Meet Again” was still queued up from when I turned it off on the highway. ‘Til the blue skies drive, the dark clouds, far away. I am struck by the comedic irony of this day and realize I am crying and laughing at the same time, sitting in my hot car that now smells slightly of tequila. I’m suddenly ridiculously happy that this was the song that came on.
—
Three days later, I’m sitting on the front porch of my house, working on research. I wear a mask, but decide it’s ok to be outside since I’m alone and haven’t been outside in days. It’s warm with a breeze and sunny. I bask in the sun for a moment, forcing myself to recognize that this will be sorely missed once November hits.
My phone buzzes against my leg. I ignore it, thinking it’s just a text. But, it buzzes again and again. I realize I’m getting a call from a number listed “Ann Arbir urgent carw” and laugh out loud, realizing that I must have put the name in when I was crying in my car, not paying attention to how I had spelled it. I come back to the moment, and suddenly, the same anxiety I felt sitting in my car rushes back to me.
“You are negative for COVID-19.”
I thank the woman on the other line and scream into the house the news; my roommates finally hug me. After a brief celebration and a loose plan to order from my favorite restaurant for dinner, I head back out to the porch to continue plugging through my excel sheet. After a minute or so, I sit back and watch the street again. It’s July, and the road is still quiet. I think back to how I felt that Ann Arbor would answer all my problems and how quickly I just experienced new ones. But in the joy of a negative test result, even though it’s no guarantee, I allow myself a much-needed sigh of relief and rejoice in the moment. Ann Arbor isn’t a cure, just a new setting with good people to help make the days between exposures and tests a little easier.
For both reasons of exposure and for the sake of caution, I have been tested six times and quarantined once more since this summer while awaiting a test result. So far, they have all been negative. So, I just do a reality check, try and ground myself, and queue up Johnny Cash.
Kennady Wade | June 29 – July 3 | St. Louis/Ann Arbor, MI