I’ve been sick for the past couple of days. Not just slightly under the weather, but full-on, fever spiking and unable to stand up without wobbling, unable to eat, unable to shit, sick. It’s the second time this has happened to me this year, which is at once a sobering reminder of my own mortality and the sad fact that I’m not as young as I used to be, and also a sign of the fact that there’s definitely something weird going around these days. (No, it’s not coronavirus.)
For all that went wrong this time around — including being unable to eat without making myself extremely nauseous, even though my hunger didn’t dissipate in the slightest, which was a joy — the worst part was, again, the realization that fevers and I are the dumbest possible pairing. When I was fevered and delirious last month, I ended up convinced I had to write some quasi time-traveling pirate story for some reason; this time around, my brain got caught up in the fact that I’ve been binging episodes of the British Love Island from last year and basically wrote some fan fic about the series.
Look. I didn’t do it intentionally, okay…?
There remains something terrifying to me about that state, though — the part where you’re very aware that your brain isn’t working right, but you can’t do anything to stop it or make it work right. As happens, there was a story that I absolutely had to write for THR on the first of the two sick days, and I was both frustrated and horrified just how difficult that ended up being; I knew, objectively, what the story was and what I’d need to do to get it done, and I’d even already written it in my head, but when it came to actually typing it out and filing it, it seemed impossible, far beyond my reach. Words simply wouldn’t come, sentences couldn’t form. I felt an alien to myself.
I write this now at the very beginning of day 3, and I feel… almost better…? The difference between how I feel now and the past couple days is extraordinary, in terms of mental clarity and my body behaving again. I don’t want to say that I’m 100% just yet, but even just knowing that I could actually string those words together makes all the difference in the world.