Acidity is a Feeling

And tomatoes feel like something.

This is stupid, but there was a point at which I thought I just wouldn’t ever get Covid. We’d been surgically careful at the beginning of the pandemic, and took a lot longer to get back to “normal” than most people. Our caution lost us friendships, business, opportunities, beach raves, memories. It was all worth it, we thought, to keep each other safe. 

Once we were all vaccinated, boosted, a few of us got sick and came out on the other side mostly unscathed. At a certain point, it felt crazy to be the only one wearing a KN95 at a drag show, to be the only one asking for an outside table in the rain, to be the only one testing before a dinner party. So at a certain point, we just stopped. We went to the OC. We hosted a weekly dance party. We met our friends at bars with no airflow. And then, as if science could have predicted it, I tested positive the Saturday of Carnival week. 

I was really careful before July 4th week. I was really careful before Bear Week. And then, to be honest, I kind of thought we were in the clear. I’m writing to you now from my bed, on day 5 of testing positivity. My fever has receded, my sense of taste has disappeared, I still have this strange knot of congestion in an inaccessible recess behind my sinuses, and going up and down the stairs more than once gets me winded. I feel so lucky to be vaccinated and boosted, and so utterly abandoned by the medical and legislative community. 

A week before I tested positive, the CDC amended its guidance to say that after five days of quarantine, even if you are still testing positive, you can go back out into the world, masked. I’m not an epidemiologist, but to me, the science behind that doesn’t seem to — well — exist. 

My symptoms started on a Friday with an itchy throat, sneezing, gross congestion. I’d had a cold a few weeks before, so I assumed I’d cooked myself up a sinus infection and tried to get an appointment at our overrun, beleaguered health clinic. Monday, after work was the best I could do. I took it, hoping I wouldn’t need it. That night (this is a familiar refrain by now) I woke up with chills, a fever, brutal muscle aches, and the kind of headache we usually pathologize. The next day, I dragged myself to urgent care, still certain it was a sinus infection because I’d rapid tested myself so many times. After a long wait outside, a nurse handed me a nasal swab to perform on myself, now almost second nature. I sat in the car, with the windows rolled down to await my results, trying to take box breaths and make sure nothing was going crazy at Pop+Dutch in my absence. The phone rang, the nurse from inside on the other end. 

“Hi honey, I just want to let you know that you’ve tested *very* positive for Covid. You need to go home and rest, stay inside and away from other people for five days. After five days, if you still test positive, you can go out wearing a mask. Do you have any questions?”

So now, I’m laying in my bed, with a box of tissues next to me in case I sneeze productively, taking 1,000mg of acetaminophen every six hours to keep my head from exploding, trying desperately to taste anything, and thinking about how tomorrow, Carnival day, I will feel pressure from my staff, my partner, the CDC, and — most severely — myself to go in to work at my restaurant wearing two masks, and desperately praying I don’t get anyone sick, on one of the busiest, most chaotic days of the year.

If I wake up and test negative, I’ll go. My stamina will, no doubt, be reduced. My productivity will, no doubt, be decimated. My brain will, no doubt, not be firing on all cylinders (ask me how long it just took me to think of the word “amended”). At the end of the day, rather than hang out on the stoop drinking margaritas with the crew and watching the parade, I will try to slip out of the building and back to my bed before the thousands of costumed revelers swirl around me, still contagious, in the street. If I wake up and test positive again, I will stay home, feeling guilty for not being able to help, and salty for missing the soul-bonding experience of sitting on the stoop drinking margaritas.

Sean and the crew at Pop+Dutch have held things down remarkably well in my absence. I’ve tried to help any way I can from here, writing the schedule, ordering the mayonnaise, trying to estimate how many cases of eggs and chicken they went through while I wasn’t there. But that does nothing to alleviate the fatigue of everyone trying to make up for the manual labor that I do next to them in there every day. The big rounds of dishes, the carrying the fifty pound sack of flour up the stairs, the crouching down to drain and refill the steam oven. Never mind the mental and emotional labor — the scheduling questions, the ingredient questions, the “where does this go” everyday dance that we all usually do together. 

To keep him virus-free and our livelihood able to remain functioning, Sean and I have been masking in the house. I stay upstairs in the bedroom, he has the downstairs kitchen and living room, where he’s slept on the pull-out couch for a week. We share a bathroom, which we both wear a mask in unless we absolutely have to take it off to brush our teeth or shower. It’s important to note that we’re extremely lucky — if Sean got sick at the same time and we had to shut the whole operation down, we’d be upset, but it probably wouldn’t ruin us. But I wouldn’t say that on behalf of anyone on our staff having to miss a full week of wages and tips. Where would that leave them? Lots of people in Provincetown make their money for the entire year during the summer, so missing a full, busy week like this one might be the equivalent to a month at your year-round job. All this on the tail end of one of the busiest, most challenging, and most personally heartbreaking summer seasons we’ve ever had. 

This is careful choreography that millions of people have had to figure out on their own, to varying degrees of success. I feel so lucky to have been able to wait this long to learn the steps, and for my symptoms and our circumstances to have not been more severe. 

Even so, we are, to be honest, barely holding it together. Everyone’s nerves are frazzled, bodies exhausted, the membrane between crying and not crying very thin. This, to be fair, is always true in August, but did any of us really need to be living through this without an ounce of official support? There is no more Covid leave assistance, no more free rapid Covid testing, no more Covid relief grants. But clearly… there is still Covid, right? Many of us may not need to live in fear of death or hospitalization, but it is still capable of wreaking havoc on our lives, right? 

The two selfish, petty things I want the most right now are: 1) a really big hug, and 2) to be able to taste a double-cheeseburger. 

My sense of taste disappeared sometime between Saturday and Sunday, and because I am the way that I am, I’ve been doing experiments with what flavors and scents are strong enough to break through. So far, not many. 

The first real breakthrough came Monday — I made myself a bowl of the spiciest, saltiest, cheapest ramen possible. I did my usual tricks of stirring in sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy, and chili crisp. Because I hadn’t eaten a vegetable in a few days, I tossed in a handful of baby spinach, and a small bowl of the yellow cherry tomatoes I harvested from the garden. I fizzed up some Emergen-C powder in a tumbler of water, and took it all outside to the back porch, to get my allotted 15 minutes of sunshine and fresh air for the day. The ramen was… hot. I could tell that it was salty, but I wouldn’t say that I could really taste that. The spice from the chili sizzled on my tongue, but also without any real flavor. This is a very disorienting experience. Then, I popped a broth-warmed cherry tomato in my mouth and realized something very important: tomatoes feel like something. The acidity — which really is more of a feeling than a flavor, I realized — washed over my tongue, mixed with the other sensations, and it was the closest I’ve been to tasting in many days. 

I grew these tomato plants from teeny tiny seeds that arrived in the mail in teeny tiny plastic bags set inside teeny tiny envelopes. They started on a bench next to our dining table this winter, got re-potted and set on the deck in the spring, then finally buried in compost in the garden in the summer. We’ve spent this whole year together so far, and they really came through for me this August, in a way I didn’t expect to need them to. It’s really easy to be lonely and find despair while you’re sick. But tomatoes feel like something.

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You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a (sometimes) weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!