Covid Scare Olalla Levi
We’d found out when the plane touched ground that she had Covid. It was our expected 16- and 20-year-old decision to immediately call it a bluff. Almost as soon as she opened the email, it was swiped to archive. I worried a little because my tonsils seemed larger than when we’d taken off, but tonsillitis wasn’t a symptom of Covid, and I had tested negative according to the truck by our house. Mother was the only other person in on the scandal. She advised Julia to flip her phone to airplane mode for the rest of the trip and just enjoy the Duomo. We drove to Aunt Kat’s house, lacing back from the airport through Florence, enclosed by European architecture. Its soft walls and colors and its nonchalance filtered out every freeze-frame that came before it. And yet, it was the Italian nights that did me in. Their hot and sticky nature would set in and I’d feel what the ibuprofen had subdued during the day. The top of my mouth would sink under my tonsils’ weight. My body melted liquid with no viscosity in the un-airconditioned back room. The next day, I worried Julia about my ailments so much that she came with me to the backstreets of Florence. Looking like two teens about to shoot up, we unpacked a mini at-home Covid test as mopeds steered by. But minutes later, only one red line showed at C, so we were negative. I spent another 10 days on a triple pack of ibuprofen and Aleve and another ten on two waters to spare myself the useless foreign, untranslatable and unhelpful doctor’s visits that plague cliche vacations. In September when some dicey interaction had left me panic-stricken in a doctor’s office, a blood test was done, and I was relieved then that what I’d had those August weeks causing me to cough up green phlegm at the sight of the birth of Venus was mononucleosis.
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