Gianluca. Bologna, Italy 

Covid-19 positive

“I tested positive since March 6. A few days later they decided to hospitalize me: extensive pneumonia and extreme pain, relentlessly. In the hospital I experienced very dark moments, often thinking I wouldn’t make it. Yet, very slowly, I improved and after two weeks I was discharged. Since then I have been locked in a room of the house where I live with Sara, my partner. After 19 days from discharge, and 38 from the beginning of the disease, I had the results of the control test: still positive. I feared it, the quarantine will therefore continue. Some symptoms seem to be returning and I fall asleep with the terror of reliving what I went through at the hospital. With Sara, we talk and see each other on the phone, from one room to another. She  – who has had a slight fever for over a month, but tested negative – takes care of me. She cooks, opens my door and places the dishes on the floor while we look at each other behind our protective masks. Our cats stare at me as I go to the bathroom and look at me questioningly. I don’t live with them anymore and I can’t touch them. The room in which I am is not large but is filled with the light and the green of trees outside. The sofa bed is surrounded by my instruments: the guitars and the piano. At the moment I am unable to play them due to muscle pain in my right arm, a consequence of the virus and drugs. This experience, which I hope to get out of soon, has marked me in many ways. The wave of affection and closeness that comes from near and far friends, relatives, and even from strangers, has been and still is huge and exciting. A demonstration of solidarity that will not stop moving me and that I hope will persist in the hearts of all of us even when we slowly return to normality, in a new world “.