When the Sun Rose Like the Moon

In 2019, the Covid-19 virus was identified. In 2020, the world shut down as a result of a global pandemic of this virus. I managed not to contract it myself until 2021, but when I did I was quite sick for 5 weeks and took another several to recover, with occasional long-term relapses. Almost a year to the day from the first time, I contracted it again in 2022. That time, I was only mildly ill, but then went into more significant Long Covid symptoms, and they remained, keeping me out of work for months, then resulting in recurring migraines, among other things.

The following is a true story of something that occurred one morning when I was driving to work, and the way that I was thinking about it in relation to how my mind felt when the migraines set in and the Covid-induced brain fog returned. Given the tendency of people to somewhat jokingly refer to pre-Covid times as "the before times," though, and given the nature of the phrase that sprang to mind to describe the incident, and which I used to title it, I opted to write this true story as though it were a dystopian fiction. If at any point you are unsure what some of the more "fictional" terms used are referencing, see the end for a glossary of terms.

The morning that the sun rose like the moon came two years after the Sickness.

The Sickness wasn’t done, mind you. It was still in the world, seemed like it always would be. People had just sort of accepted it as the new normal of life. Whatever “normal” was supposed to be, the Sickness wasn’t it, but people adapt, and the whole world adapted to this.

I had the Sickness twice. I was one of the blessed, not adding to the body count of those the Sickness took from us. Still, it was rough. I never understood why some touched by the Sickness barely seemed ill at all, while others were slain by it. I fell among those who struggled hard and felt the effects long after, but without drawing near death.

Before the Sickness, I was always prone to infirmities of the head. Sometimes they became severe, but the healer recommended a vitality powder which helped reduce them. But after the Sickness, they increased again, and worse. While my regular infirmities of the head increased somewhat in frequency, I became quite prone to more incapacitating versions, a peculiar kind of head infirmity–the Agonizing Headscrews.

What I had always known about the Agonizing Headscrews is that they hurt more than most head pains, and that just because an infirmity was particularly painful did not mean that it was the Agonizing Headscrews. There were several mysterious elements, apparently understood only by certain of the healers, that dictated whether it was truly the Agonizing Headscrews, but there were also other symptoms unrelated to pain. Those I knew who had experienced them described them as strange effects on their vision, difficulty with thought as though fibers were stuffed into their minds, a sense of everything being distorted as by water, instability when standing, unnaturally decreased hunger, and more.

I may have experienced the Agonizing Headscrews before. I suspect I had. But after my two battles with the Sickness, the second of which I truly wasn’t sure I would fully recover from, the Agonizing Headscrews became frequent. They took some time for even the more knowledgeable healers to identify because, strangely, they did not always come with pain, though nearly all the other symptoms were present. The most frustrating to me, though, was the sense of clouds or fibers in my mind.

It is difficult to describe to one who hasn’t experienced it, but I shall try. It feels as though my mind is a machine where the motion of one part sets into motion the next part. Do you know the kind? A giant hammer on a hinge swings at a lever, the lever moves to push the stone, the stone rolls down a ramp to land on a platform, and a thousand other parts I do not understand all work together to keep the machine in motion while workers at one end load and workers at another end unload the ore they are mining, or whatever else the machine runs. A basic understanding of how different materials interact tells me that if you were to place a stack of fabric between the hammer and the lever, it would reduce the impact of the hammer, which in turn would reduce the reactions of each subsequent element, thus reducing the machine’s power. It would all slow, perhaps to such a degree that it could no longer move forward correctly at all.

This is what those mind fibers feel like. As though many different portions of my mind connect to move my thoughts ever forward, but either the Sickness or the Agonizing Headscrews place fibers between the parts, reducing the impact of one piece against the next, slowing all my thoughts. The entire landscape of my mind reshapes to something that I both recognize and don’t. I feel entirely aware of what it is and who I am, yet the way my thoughts move forward is entirely different from my mind’s usual process.

The morning that the sun rose like the moon, I was on my way to my regular day of tradecraft. The clouds sat low—not fully on the ground, but within the tree tops. All was a fog, a haze. In the roads I travel daily, there is a spot at which the tree cover breaks and I am greeted by the rising sun. It helps me wake for my day, but also often is difficult to look at.

Not on that day. That day, when I reached the break, I did not see the sun. I saw the moon rising in the sun's place.

It took me several moments to realize that I was, in fact, seeing the sun. The fog and haze were obscuring it some, but not the way clouds often do—either darkening or diffusing it. Instead, they were obscuring only the corona, leaving the sun easier to look at and with sharply defined edges. Familiar, functional, but not the sun to which I am accustomed. It was bizarre, jarring, to see what appeared as a bright moon in the place where the brilliant sun should be.

Later that day, the mind fibers, the fog, set into my head again as I felt the incoming Agonizing Headscrews. I felt the outward motions of my mind get slowed, beginning to look like something else, familiar yet different, as my thoughts could no longer reach as far.

Never have I felt I so thoroughly understood the sun, as the day the sun rose like the moon.

Glossary: Translating "Dystopian" Terms into Modern Terms

the Sickness: Covid-19

infirmities of the head: headaches

healer: doctor

vitality powder: vitamins [in this case, riboflavin]

the Agonizing Headscrews: migraines

more knowledgable healers: specialist

tradecraft: work