I’m moving back into the bedroom tonight.

Mr. Mezzo has been feeling a bit not-quite-okay since last week. As of Monday morning, the symptoms included a tiny bit of shortness of breath.

Cue the obligatory telehealth appointment and COVID test.

Now, I was cautiously optimistic that he’d turn out to be okay. We’ve been super-careful, what with only going out for essential errands and staying masked all the while. But, we’ve all seen stories about those rare cases here and there, where someone has done all the rights things and stayed masked and still gotten that 1-in-a-million chance infection.

So in the same way we knew that getting tested was the right choice, out of an abundance of caution, we decided to play it extra safe inside the house. Mr. Mezz stayed quarantined in the main bedroom suite, and I set up on our living room couch.

Now, I can’t complain. For the one thing, couch sleeping is actually one of my super-powers, something I proved a year ago when I had to set up a similar sleeping nest to keep my broken elbow protected and immobilized. For another thing, this is quite literally the most comfortable couch in the world—something I learned back with that broken elbow sleeping nest last November. So I’d be lying to pretend that there was any sort of physical discomfort or suffering that I went through in this brief quarantining episode.

Still, as Mr. Mezz and I kept a safe distance from each other, as we did most of our talking via text, and as we stayed masked during the few quick face-to-face conversations we had in the common kitchen space, I had such a feeling of double-consciousness.

On the one hand, it was totally surreal. And on the other, it was completely normal. (At least, as “normal” as anything is in this dumpster fire of a year.)

This is the way we live now. And I don’t have the brainspace right now to really dig into the details, but I have this slowly growing awareness about how irrevocably changed I expect to be after living through this particular stretch of cultural trauma.

This is the way we live now.

But luckily for me, the negative test results came through a bit earlier today. So I’m really, really enjoying the chance for us to spend an evening together in the same room, even in (especially in?) companionable silence. And I will enjoy being cuddled back into bed tonight where I belong.

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Image credits: Both photos taken by the author, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.