Rising rhythms raising rates,
Heating higher heights unhealthy,
Wake up worse,
What was sore is more,
What was noticeable is noticed.
Did gravity triple?
Your limbs grow roots?
Short breaths resurrect fears not forgotten.
Crawling through your bones, and up your spine,
The ill feels like Covid climbed out of hiding.

You've fallen, Friend

What you did, you didn't know, 
Lived a little,
Or stood too long.
You may have had a month, or an hour, of something better.
A walk, a week's work, a paycheck,
A "good day."
Bones without the ache of fever,
or the full body distracting torment of chill.

Fall like an autumn leaf.
You know what's coming, 
You've been here before, Long Hauler.
Don't be discouraged;
You know what's coming, 
But each time you know more,
And start over.
Breathe, rest, gather, be calm.

Fight what you can change,
Not falling leaves. 
This is not the season you wanted, 
not the pain, the loss, the fog, or the fight.
Fallen from our old lives,
We keep falling into Covid again and again.
One battle wasn't enough, maybe, 
But hundreds, mean you are a fighter.

Your unfamiliar autumn, to us, is full of falls we find too familiar.
Different degrees of collapse, but all decrying the crash.
Chills like an old nurse dropping you in bed, 
Pulling all the covers up while air conditioning roars.

Battle roll out of bed, 
Fevered, help kids afflicted, or
Go to work scrubbed in fog and faintness, 
Testing dizziness and brain function as a fiction. 
Patients, clients, children...do you perform?
Struggling, falling with your list of recognized disabilities, 
Comorbidities you never knew existed. 
You now advocate, fighter.
While your body is on fire.

A season will come, maybe spring,
When we'll forget our last fall into relapse.

We will never forget to notice...
                      ...feeling healthy.
                            -RJLETTS

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