I had tried to call James. It was always going to be a bit awkward but me being in quarantine calling him, presumably also in quarantine because they’d contract traced him back from me, just dialled the discomfort up several notches. I didn’t want to see him again but I hadn’t planned on letting him down by having to apologise for, at best, a couple of weeks in isolation and, at worst, giving him the virus. He didn’t pick up. I didn’t really blame him and it was a relief, to be honest. I messaged him an apology.

I was finding it hard in the ICU. I wasn’t cut out for solitude and I felt claustrophobic, pacing the floor, counting steps from one side of the room to the other, each time hoping there would be something after the sixth stride. When I wasn’t connected to the others on a call or reassuring my parents that everything was okay I looked through old photographs, mostly the shots from my trip last year. I kept coming back to the pictures of Salar de Uyuni, the endless stretches of the cracked, white salt flats unrolling to the horizon. On my last day a local lake overflowed and the surface salt got covered in a thin film of water; it was as if someone had polished the earth, the sky mirrored perfectly on itself in the ground. There was a photo of me standing, arms outstretched to the canopy of blue above, in perfect symmetry with my own reflection. I looked like I was suspended in an infinite azure canvas.

I stated to feel tired on day five. I hadn’t done a good job hiding how breathless I was after Cora’s karaoke; I laughed it off as the fact that I was the only one that picked something with any kind of tempo, joked that when we got out we were going to find a proper karaoke bar, neck tequila slammers, and shout our way through ‘Like A Prayer’. (Leah had smirked that she knew I couldn’t do ‘Like A Virgin’ after the other night; I had ignored her). I started coughing in the night and a nurse came to check on me, said it was nothing to worry about, it always started near the end of the first week and usually blew itself out in a few days at my age.  My temperature was up. It was one of the few readings on my bedside monitor I understood.

I stayed off the video call as much as I could the next morning. I didn’t want to worry the others but that didn’t work out so well; my phone just filled up with messages asking if I was alright and why I wouldn’t pick up. When I did join they did varying jobs of masking their reaction to my appearance: April managed it best, barely registering any change in her expression, whereas Cora almost burst into tears and ended up pretending to have dropped something so she could duck out of shot and compose herself. I blamed it on the medical strip lighting bouncing back off a lot of white walls but they weren’t buying it. It would have helped if Leah wasn’t still rocking her usual olive skinned, Mediterranean thing. April broke the silence and said I should leave the pale and ghostly vibe to the professionals.

Decisions were made for me in the afternoon. There was a steady procession of doctors and nurses, a flurry of activity in inverse relation to my own. They told me to go back to bed but they needn’t have bothered, I was drained and just wanted to close my eyes and try to sleep. I dozed, drifting in and out of consciousness. At some point I felt someone lift my hand and slip something on to the end of my finger, the monitor readings by the bed updated. The temperature number went up. I sank further down.

Nothing was clear. My body coiled under hospital sheets, kicking them off, burning. Someone would come in, say something that didn’t really register, and tuck me back in. I kicked them off again. Sleeping. Waking. Sleeping. I slipped between those states, occupied somewhere in between, here but not here. I walked the salt flats in Peru. Remembered drinking in Buenos Aires, cold beers under a South American sun. I lay on the beaches of Rio. Danced the carnival. Exchanged halting Spanish with a guy in a club, distant memory of the pounding bass feeling like my heart thumping, accelerated in my chest. It was hot. In the club. In this bed. In the club. Pounding, pounding, pounding.

I think I slept. I think I was awake. There was a mask over my mouth and nose and I could hear the sound of my own breath; a ragged, rasping sound supplemented with a hiss of artificial air. There was something in my hand, wires and tubes over my head.

I thought of the others. They slipped in and out of focus. Cora’s resolve, her underlying sadness. Leah’s spirit and joy. April. Clever, perceptive, lonely April. I tried to tell them that I was okay, that it was all going to be okay. I tried to tell them about Peru. How I was safe, frozen in the limitless canopy of sky and lake, suspended from harm in a dream and not writhing, feverish, delirious, on a bed in an isolation unit, shackled to an oxygen tube that was inflating my lungs.