25th Apr 2021 – Innerdialects

Ahhhhm! We did it. Covaxin. Indian bred, off Bharat Biotech. After tiny zing in left arm, a 0.01% lightheaded wooshiness. One numb finger for 2 secs. Nothing in the next three hours. Then a mini wave thru’ head,

assisted by tingles. One tweak in left shoulder. What was going on? I felt a few rhesus monkey bro/ guinea pigs nodding. They’d been thru the thing. Was ok. We are recipients of ‘inactivated covid cells’. Eeeek, what?

‘Yes,’ nods Rhesus shadow.

I lie very still in bed. My doc sis Li asks me to lie prone. To breathe better. Its like sweet iron clasping all lungs.

Gabriel standing near by with unused wing grins. Nope my time mayn’t be near yet, what was I thinking? He is amused. I had the vaccine. I’d gotten the nerve to get it.

NJ my husband’s steel nerve was kind of contagious. Him and my sis’s. These people are fearless creations. They walk casually into vaccine centers with PPE people that’d make a Goliath gulp😅. These folk only fear God, they eat Psalms and mutate prayers that can kill Covid. I mean why can’t they just pray?

They say that they prayed for a vaccine, so.

In the aftermath of Dose 1, no fevers to report, day 3 still is loll- tongued – fatigue – gratitude.

We joke about it- what if we’d gotten some unspellable superpower; like Spiderman did from a spider…

Sigh. I think we are getting a power from it all: a certain brotherhood that never was there even last year this time.

At the vaccine Centre, we nodded at strangers, eyes connecting. Since last year we have earned eyebrow lifts and head waggings. We have understood the patterns of eyes crinkling at smiles, we care some.

Our Post/ pre- vaccine- strangers and Medics were the nicest I’ve ever seen, social distancing et al.

The world is perhaps morphing into a place with Power: the kind of power that understands Time? And the Space between each other?

We apologize for that seat between; share notes about how we registered to get here. Yea. Token numbers, and “How are you feeling?” after the jab.

Never have I experienced such meeting of eyes at anywhere!

😳Never held a dead killer in my veins, never before have we tread the vale of shadows like now, and felt the cover of Superior Intelligence kick in.

All those nudges and antibody- smirks @ Sars-Cov😨 ……… are Reminders that we live in a Time like never before. Its a World War Three, and we are in cross fire.

As I write this, India reels. I’m not looking at the numbers today, at the oxygen tanks not available, the hospital beds not there, the cemeteries too full to take in anymore.

Yes, an Earth reeling, breaking, broken, hurting, hurling into the next month, its curves & spikes scream.

If we’re there a day, we happy, grateful. We eat, pray, hold on to each other across distances.

Yeah. We wish each, the best. We seriously love each other. We aren’t shy to know that. We care. I pray these vaccines work. That they also immunize us from Fear, and that we can seriously go out and make friends and be friends to some serious loneliness out there, and within.