Sao Paulo, October 2025.
Life happens while you're sick
Laying on the bed awake at 4:30 in the morning, unable to get back to sleep due to symptoms, I'm told by the sick spirits wisdom that life happens in these spaces too.
In the silence of the world and the feline meows that only people who can't sleep but can't leave the bed listen to. In the morning coffee that needs to be extra miraculous for you to somehow manage the day. Sick life happens on those liminal spaces of thoughts between symptoms, relationships, and how much you can give up and how much you can offer without landing on the hospital or in a "fatigue bender", just to paraphrase people talking about "things" they do and can't get rid of.
It happens in the crip wisdom of having to calculate everything, it happens in the knowledge that you are your body because your body is always remembering you that it exists, as a being, and not a machine. (Machines break, bodies get sick - just in case that capitalism lied to you too)
While I would love to live without all the symptoms, I wouldn't want to lose all the things I have learned throughout the years.
Life happens while you're sick, now at six in the morning, laying awake in pain while others sleep because this, this is life too.
(Picture by Roberta Santana)