It’s like jumping into a cold shower. You just dive in. You don’t overthink it. The more you wait and contemplate, the more anxious you become, the more hesitant you get.

The motion of swinging from place to place seated on wheels feels different from lifting and stepping -the energy it takes and the footprint of the weight of your entire body on the ground. There is an effort to it, a triumphant victory when you reach where you were going. There is something primal about using your feet to take you where you are going. How far your feet can take you, how much your breath can carry you determines how far you can go.

The first time I entered a car after two months, I understood the expression which a person not accustomed to riding in cars once made- ‘the wonder that is travelling while sitting’. I got dizzy after, almost as if I had been on an eight hour journey to Kabale almost with the same magnitude it had in childhood. My body had adapted eventually. I hadn’t noticed.

It wasn’t just the motion sickness. The week before the national Lock down was lifted, I was waking up feeling and looking like I had been punched in the face. I walked with a physical weight upon my body, my head pounding. I had been waking up light and airy- after the 21 days were announced – reading, working, writing, thinking about what I would make for breakfast. But now, I woke up in fear, vivid dreams escaping from the night time.

At 3:00 a.m. or so, for about a week, I woke up coughing. It tickled and tortured and ambushed me until I had to wake up. I checked the time. 2:59 a.m. 3:00 a.m. 3:00 a.m. 4:30 a.m. 3:19 a.m.

Our little boy, his intuition still incredibly high, could hear me worrying. He heard my fear of leaving him, of not being there when he wakes up, of coming back at the end of the day just to put him to bed. I check on him every night before I sleep, change his position, check his diaper, change it if full, sometimes just change it anyway in my half-asleep night walking, cover him, tuck in the blanket and lay my hand against his back in silent prayer.

But unlike other nights when he continues to sleep peacefully, the nights before work commenced, he jumped out of his sleep, minutes after I had left crying loudly and holding onto his blanket for comfort, his eyes pinched from the sudden transition of darkness to light. When I took him out, or rather when he jumped out, he wanted to play. He now wanted us to turn on the lights everywhere so we could play together. He would pretend to want ‘Ata’ (water). As I stood undecided on whether he was actually hungry, he ran towards his toys thinking that I was walking to the sitting room. His fearful look turned into a gleeful sprint. He wanted to make the most of the night.

On the first morning, when Monday came, with heavy eyes but a resolved determination, I jumped into the ice cold water. As I was coming back from work, I drove by the supermarket and remembered our steps. One. Two. Three. Three thousand steps to buy groceries on an early Saturday morning. Light, bright and airy at 7:00 a.m., he had his backpack on his back and I had my reusable cloth bag with the office logo and we journeyed to buy breakfast.