I was finishing my Saturday workout when my ex-boyfriend texted: "Omg, I'm feeling warm and weak."
Ray, who was out car shopping, was staying with me for a few days in Dallas before he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas.
I called him: "Meet me at the apartment. Don't stop for anything. We'll take your temperature and figure out what to do next," I said in the softest whisper I could manage so as not to alert my fellow health enthusiasts at my downtown gym.
Within the hour, I watched Ray's temperature climb to 100.7 degrees. He shook under the sheets in my bed, burning and freezing simultaneously.
At that moment on July 11, everything I had reported about the coronavirus pandemic since March for The Dallas Morning News came rushing back to me: the data, the politics, the nurses, the disenfranchised, the survivors.
The virus _ smaller than a speck of dust _ and everything it brought with it was now in my one-bedroom apartment.
What little distance I was able to put between me and the all-consuming story disappeared.
