Elisa Groth
My name is Elisa Groth, and I am 26 years old and from Berlin, Germany. I was born on February 12, 2000, and graduated from school in 2019. Only months later, in February 2020, I developed Long Covid at the age of 20. Since then, I have lived with constant head and eye pain. After a reinfection in 2023, my condition worsened significantly, leaving me mostly bedridden and unable to tolerate daylight without sunglasses.
Among many losses, the most painful has been my inability to read, because it leaves me with even more pain. Reading was my greatest passion and a vital source of strength, especially in the early years of my illness. Alongside Long Covid, I live with PEM, POTS, and MCAS. Writing has become my way of holding on—to memories, to thoughts, to myself.
The text I am submitting was written on my 26th birthday.
My dreams
I am often asked what I will do once I am healthy. The question is asked with a strange sense of certainty, as if health were an open corridor at the end of which everything is already waiting—universities, careers, the orderly life of a young woman in her twenties.
As if the future were a plan, simply waiting for my body’s signature.
I nod. Sometimes I smile.
But when I close my eyes, something else happens. The narrative others have created for me begins to dissolve, and beneath it, a much simpler, almost childlike longing appears.
I want to walk barefoot through a meadow. Not metaphorically. Really. I want to feel the wind on my skin without it feeling like a threat. I want to see the light without having to filter it, without placing sunglasses between myself and the world as if brightness were something to be protected against.
Sometimes I imagine climbing a tree.
Feeling the bark beneath my fingers, breathing in its dry, dusty scent. Sitting up high, letting my legs dangle, and looking into the sky long enough for time to lose its urgency.
I think of an oversized bouquet of wildflowers, heavy in my arms, so heavy that the stems begin to bend. Of soil beneath my fingernails when I bury my hands in it.
Of ants crossing their paths with quiet determination. Of beetle shells shimmering in the light.
I want to watch a sunset—from its first fading to the last trace of ember on the horizon. Without having to close my eyes.
I want to feel the warmth of the sun without it feeling as though I am burning from within.
I want to read a book. Page by page.
To lose myself in another consciousness without my own body constantly calling me back with pain.
I want to kiss someone—long, absentmindedly—without counting the pain in the background like seconds.
I want to eat without calculating.
To wake up, open the curtains, and not perceive the light as a risk, but as a gentle joy in the morning.
Sometimes it surprises me how elemental my desires have become. A naïve, romantic longing to feel what the earth has to offer.
I want to be able to live in my body without fear. I want to be in the world without fighting against it.
I want to live.
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