I got my second shot on the second of May and, after — while still cautious — I started doing some activities I hadn’t done since the previous March. Most importantly, I visited my 95-year-old grandfather, one of the most significant people in my life who, prior to COVID, I had the fortune of being able to see every few weeks. (Our reunion ended the way it usually has for the last almost-thirty years — with the two of us watching black and white films in the living room and me eventually falling asleep on the couch before him because, despite our age difference, his bedtime is about four-and-a-half hours after mine).

I spent my first week back in NYC going to every type of doctor’s appointment imaginable. I thought of myself as healthy, almost laughably so, considering our placement in the midst of a pandemic, but after over a year of pushing off all but one meeting with a medical professional due to COVID, I scheduled a different appointment for each day of that first week I returned.

Before I traumatically sprayed blood all over my oral surgeon and his office after an artery burst during my wisdom tooth surgery in January, I thought I would never see him again. At 28, I was geriatric (his words, definitely not mine) for the surgery, but even so, we both expected it to go well enough that I would be in and out of his office within the day.

That is not what happened.

I’ve felt very exhausted by the pandemic this month and I know that’s not a unique experience. The realization that we have been doing this for almost a year really hit me hard and every sentence that stuck out to me in February seemed to jump out because of how I could relate it to the loneliness/fear/monotony/etc I have been feeling for what seems like…. forever.

For the past year, I have been tracking every book I read by writing elementary-school level summaries for each of them. They are brief, including only the title, the author and a sentence that usually starts out with “I loved this book…” or “I did not like this book…” and there are a lot of them because, in addition to reading very, very fast, I am also one of those very, very annoying people who refuses to stop a book partway through, even if I absolutely hate it and complain about it the entire time.