I am used to the idea of “con crash” — that period after a convention where, basically, your body decides that it’s time to stop and maybe have a little enforced rest for awhile; that’s almost certainly the case after the first convention of the year, when your body is in something approaching shock at having just gone through it all for the first time in awhile, or after a particularly heavy or busy convention. It’s not a bad thing, per se; it’s just this blip in health as if a breaker has been triggered and your body needs you to sit down for a bit.
Friends, whatever happened last week was con crash times a million. I’m not entirely sure what happened — I tested negative for COVID, although others I was around during Emerald City Comic Con weren’t so lucky — but I was basically knocked out for a week or so, as my body decided that it was time to just stop. I had the fever, I had the headache, I had the dizziness and the stuffiness of both the nose and the throat. I had it all, and I wasn’t the only one: not only were other people in this here house sick too (Because of me? I genuinely have no idea, in part because it didn’t feel as if I even had enough time to infect anyone before they got sick too), but so were other people in my work.
I’m still not 100% healthy, even as I write this. (On the same day that you’ll read it, unusually! Who says this isn’t the Mighty Marvel Age of breaking-into-prescheduled-posts-to-update-you-all-on-my-health-or-lack-thereof?) But I’m feeling slightly less insane, slightly less out of sorts and removed from reality after seven days of… well, just an entirely lost week, really. I feel as if I’m stumbling back into the harsh light of The Discourse, uncertain what’s been going on and tensing up to deal with whatever’s just around the corner.