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Nothing Feels Right About This

We’re walking into disaster.

Jessica Wildfire
6 min readJul 11, 2021

He crossed the aisle, heading straight for me, staring straight through me like I didn’t even exist — without a mask. I stood to one side as he wafted past, so close our shoulders almost touched.

A few days later, I started feeling sick. I woke up with fatigue and brain fog. The next day, sniffles and a cough. A slight headache. This prompted me to do one of those at-home Covid tests.

It turned out negative.

This time.

Imagine next time. Imagine catching the latest variant just by passing a stranger and infecting your entire family, and one of you becomes one of those rare, severe breakthrough infections we’re seeing more and more of, despite assurances from experts that we have absolutely nothing to worry about, 90-something percent of the time, assuming we live in a state without aggressive mouth breathers running wild.

It’s a new form of harassment where I live, the subtle but malicious walk-by exhaling. This is life in my state now. It doesn’t matter if you’re vaccinated. It doesn’t matter if you wear the best mask. There’s a big, mean portion of the population who wants people like me to feel unsafe.

I guess they see it as payback.

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