Sick

I’ve been visited by a true ruler of the planet. I’m not sure which variety, pedigree, house or cadre, but one of vessels of life itself has made residence in my sinuses and is ruling my body in aches and sneezes, oozes and limits. It is, however, a generous ruler, and gives freely its largess of copious snot.

Fortunately, I am a-self-employed writer, creating masterpieces out of trauma, big and little. Here’s one now. When I finally get the energy to write again, I’ll have a renewed understanding of sickness, infection and misery that I might have forgotten from the last hundred times I was here. Am I fortunate or what?

My doctor swears I’m not contagious, at least I think that’s what he said. It was hard to understand him through the blue biohazard suit.

I suffer, and like all great writers, and men in general I hear, I shall not bear my misery alone. I will tell the world! I will move them to sympathize, to feel the pressure and my dry nasal passages, the dizziness and dehydration. It burns, it smears the world. Pressures the senses, makes things oblong, stretched, and gooey. Here is proof that reality is only what we perceive, and is how we perceive it. The world is thick semi-clear yellowish resistance. This is true. This is here. The air is thick, pushes back against the slightest disturbance, a hand reaching for a tissue, a head raising to see the cat. The pillow is harder, the Kleenex turned to sand paper, the water to paste, the caffeine to nectar. Time is not frozen, but freezing. Glacial and quiet. Long moments of nothing, staring, empty, waiting, and sudden returns to now, which is later but still the same. Pills alarm, reminders to eat, stand, email, think.

It is a gift. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. I count my blessings that this bug is not anti-biotic resistance and that I have the time and means to mend and notice it. I bow down to the rulers of life, the teachers of death, the lenses of reality.

I got a bug.