All These Selves.

He is typing something into his computer when he says: “Covid tends to seek out and reawaken old areas of inflammation.” I tell him that, aged 12, I had pleurisy, which left me with scarring in that exact spot; I refrain from mentioning that I sprained that ankle falling off a kerb outside a nightclub in my 20s. He nods as he hits the return on his keyboard. “There you are then,” he says.

This is the spiritual change or undiscovered country of my Covid: the virus has made me at once eight, 12 and 23 years old, all at the moment I am approaching 50, which is almost Clarissa Dalloway’s age. Covid has returned me to all that I grappled with as a child with encephalitis, and the lung infection I contracted as an awkward preteen, and incongruously the blithe twentysomething who stayed out too late and pretended all those things never happened to her at all. As I make my way across the car park, all these selves seem vividly present, within me and alongside me, as if the four of us are an unfolded chain of paper-people, for ever bound together, fluttering in the stiff breeze. But then my body, of course, knew this all along.

Maggie O'Farrell - The Guardian