At the end of January, I found myself living through an acute bout of a very modern panic: fear of the air around me.
Both my girlfriend and my dad, with whom we were living, had just tested positive for covid. He felt okay, for now, but she was miserable. Somehow, I had tested negative twice. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Kansas City, and the patients quarantined themselves into bedrooms at opposite ends. I hunkered down in the middle, delivering food while wearing a pair of masks, opening the windows every now and then even though it was freezing, and trying to fall asleep on a pullout couch while keeping a nervous eye on the airconditioning vents. With each cough and sneeze, it felt like only a matter of time before the droplets would come for me.
Few things have shifted more in the pandemic than our relationship to the air around us. Breathing a year ago was a mindless act we performed 20,000 times a day, taking in a gaseous cocktail that’s four parts nitrogen and one part oxygen. Now, each breath comes with a possibility that the cocktail may be spiked with sars-CoV-2. We buy face masks in bulk and think twice about inhaling if we pass a coughing stranger on the sidewalk. A book called Breath, about how to breathe better, was released two months into the pandemic and has been on and off the New York Times best-seller list ever since.
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