I took my son swimming today at our community pool during the quietest hour, desperate to slip past the invisible threats swirling through this summer heat.
Here in the South, the relentless heat leaves us so few safe havens for our children that we chase these pockets of normalcy wherever we can.
The only others there were a family with a frail, bald woman in her late 20s or early 30s, chatting softly with the mom.
Pale skin, not a single hair left on her head...
Cancer, I knew instantly.
Then her little blonde girl, about 4 years old in a bright strawberry swimsuit, hobbled over with that familiar coughā¦
The pieces locked together like a key turning in a rusted door.
This child, born in approximately 2021, has carried Covid home again and again.
Her family probably shrugged it off each round as a āstomach bug,āāallergies,ā or ājust a cold.ā
Year after year of quiet accumulation, until it left her mother to face the toll of her body stripped bare by cancer.
This is the timeline we now inhabit.
A slow, unfolding apocalypse of Covid that most refuse to see, yet reveals itself everywhere once you truly look and listen.
The damage plays out in plain sight around us while Covid keeps spreading, hidden within the everyday moments.
The world glances away, makes excuses and forgets, but this nightmare presses onwards.
It is simply just one unnoticed infection at a time.