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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.

I’ve been listening to music more, recently, than I have in the last year or so. It’s not that I’ve been against listening to music during that time, more that I haven’t had as much opportunity for all manner of reasons — not least of which has been the fact that I’ve been watching more television and more movies, and there’s only so much time to take in new things.

But I’ve missed music. There was a time, a long, long time ago, when music was my life — I was in my 20s and going to local record stores was a twice a week, three times a week phenomenon. This was, literally a different time, pre-internet, with me listening to the radio all the time to discover new sounds, but the record store served a similar purpose; I’d buy things with abandon based on reviews, half-listens or simply cool looking sleeves and hunker down with them, listening over and over because that was what I did. I studied music, over and over again.

That changed for all manner of reasons; my priorities changed, my life changed. There was less time and opportunity to do what I’d been doing before — I stopped living alone, and merely having conversations and co-existing with someone whose patience for new and unknown sounds was far lesser than mine was something that shifted my focus — and, sure, I missed it but there were other things to focus on, I found.

Plus, it simply got harder to listen to music, somehow; the move from CDs to mp3s and then to services like Spotify ironically paralyzed me a bit. There was so much choice that I’d find myself retreating to the familiar more often than not, and being less likely to find things I’d never heard before, or even listen to things I rarely did. I became my own greatest hits machine, unintentionally.

It was a rediscovery of old CDs that has reignited my interest in listening to music, and prompted me to want to be counterintuitive and buy new ones, burn new ones. To play them in the background again as I do the everything else of life and let the sounds sink in. Perhaps it’s another form of retreat to ways of old, but it feels like one that will let me push forward again; it feels new in unexpected, welcome ways. It feels exciting.

There came a point when Valentine’s Day just provoked a weary cynicism in me.

At the time, I justified it to myself with the usual excuses, whether it was that love shouldn’t be celebrated just one day a year but all of them, or that it was a fake holiday created to sell cards and chocolates — which may be true, but at the same time, what’s wrong with that if it gives some people something to smile about…? The truth of the matter was, I suspect, more likely to be that I knew on some level that I was in a relationship that I didn’t want to be in, and one that I didn’t want to celebrate.

To be fair, it wasn’t as if I’d had the greatest history with Valentine’s Day as a whole; I’d spend them in turmoil when I was a kid, secretly hoping to get one from a secret admirer just so’s it would mean that I had a secret admirer, and then try and play it cool when that never happened. I honestly can’t remember if I ever sent any cards in high school; I had a million crushes at any particular moment, but I suspect that I didn’t send anything in the fear that my secret be figured out and I’d have to be rejected in person.

(I had a somewhat lonely childhood, in retrospect.)

I was, then, primed to distrust Valentine’s as a holiday, with that distrust and disbelief growing as my marriage atrophied around me. It became easier to half-ass even making a nod to it — dinners postponed because of work (on her part; she’d like to work into the night, often, hiding in her office or behind her laptop), plans never fulfilled. After all, what was the point…?

A few weeks ago, I got an invite to a thing for work that was genuinely exciting but would’ve meant that I would be out of town on Valentine’s Day, and I knew I had to decline, purely because the idea of not being with Chloe on that day felt so wrong. I’m writing this a week ahead of the actual day, and we don’t have any set plans yet, but it’ll be enough for me — it’ll feel right, again, using such vague, emotional terms — to just be with her on the day this year. My cynicism is thawing, and I’m ready to become a believer again.

It feels nice. Happy Valentine’s Day.

The most surprising thing about the dream, really, may be that it happened at all. I generally don’t remember dreams these days — something I put down to sleeping well, although perhaps it’s just being forgetful — so to have this as fresh in my mind as it was when I woke up was entirely unexpected. (That I awoke at 4:30am with it in my head, equally so.)

Earlier in the week,  my therapist had asked about the most recent act of cruelty by my ex-wife, and said essentially, why aren’t you more angry? There was a reason of sorts, I told her; the very day after I’d found out about it, my health nosedived for a week and that acted as a pretty effective distraction from everything else — I was too busy feeling worried about how sick I was, and being kind of delirious in the process. I didn’t have a chance to get beyond being sad, I explained, and by now it felt as if I’d had the opportunity to talk myself out of being mad.

My dream suggests otherwise. I won’t go into too much detail, but it’s enough to say that it was a dream in which I visited the old house again as she was in the process of moving out, and got to see her express the latent cruelty of her actions in full flame, like some melodramatic movie villain.

The overall effect of it was… disturbing, I guess, would be the right word. Not because of anything this dream manifestation said or did, because she was cartoonishly drawn and more than slightly pitiful in just how callous she came across; instead, I’m shaken because the dream made it clear to me just how much pain and anger is in my head about her behavior.

It’s not unwarranted, I should add; I don’t feel shaken because that attitude feels unreasonable or too much on my part. Rather, I’m disturbed because it came out in that manner as opposed to any other way, and I don’t like the idea that my subconscious has this trapped inside it, while the rest of me can’t quite access it or process it properly. I’d say I need therapy, but even my therapist is probably wondering about this one.

January was, I’d decided by the last day of the month, actually the final month of 2019, trying its worst to end us by any means possible. It was the only explanation for how hard the month had become that I’d accept; 2020 was to be a better year, dammit, so the only explanation for January’s weight could be that it had actually been co-opted by last year, infected for a last-minute final attack like in a horror movie. Just when you thought you were safe!

It’s not that any one thing was so terrible, per se — well, the dogs disappearing to California without either warning or goodbye, thanks to my selfish ex-wife; that was — but more a confluence of events: my being sick for so long quietly, before it erupted into proper sickness; a workload that stayed stuck at oppressive, somehow; visiting family, which isn’t terrible for any reason other than the lack of privacy and downtime it affords you. Things like that.

January didn’t try to take me down in one fell swoop, but fought a war of attrition, hacking away at me so that I was so exhausted and just plain done that I’d eagerly give in just for a moment’s peace, not that anything like that was on the menu. All of which, again, felt like 2019’s shitty playbook.

And the thing is, it wasn’t just me. I’d talk to others, send supportive messages to friends and acquaintances who were also having overly turbulent months for a multitude of reasons. January, it seemed, had it in for almost all of us. Perhaps it saw us as sacrificial lambs to get the year started with the appropriate amount of bloodletting.

The month finished with a day in which Britain left the European Union, President Trump got all-but-acquitted in his impeachment trial thanks to some spectacular cowardice on behalf of the Republican Party, and I spent literally hours editing and correcting a transcript of a 42 minute call for work. It felt as clear a sign as any that January 2020 was less a month than an emotional assassin that has been quietly taking us on without a word, trying to wear us out before a final blow.

As far as I’m concerned, the year is actually starting with February this year. We’re all getting a do-over. Let’s hope this month is kinder, as well as shorter.

I’m sick, again.

I actually think it’s the same sick I’ve had for the last month or so, although Chloe promises me that I’ve been healthier than I remember; nonetheless, there’s been an air of a cold hanging around me since the holidays, something that was both boring and annoying me before this past week underscored just how much I really should have gone to a medical professional some weeks ago, instead of thinking, it’s just a cold or something, I’ll tough it out and be fine.

It strikes me, writing that, how much of that attitude comes from a mindset that belongs to a younger me that honestly could just power through such things far more easily. I’m in my mid-40s now, I shouldn’t need a night of mild terror to make me think a doctor is a good idea. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.

”Mild terror” is overselling it, perhaps. I’d been feeling a little tired, but mostly fine, for the last week or so before chills and nausea descended on me Wednesday evening. It frustrated me but little more — Chloe had a bad cold, and I figured I’d picked up an aftershock or something. A few hours later, though, it felt like something else entirely.

It wasn’t just that I couldn’t sleep that night, nor that I was fevered, with hot and cold flashes mixing with sweat in a manner that was more gross to experience than to read. Nor was it the coughing, constantly, or the accidental snorts of snot when I tried to take in air. Instead, what genuinely scared me was the realization that I was actually, literally, delirious for a number of hours in the middle of everything — obsessed with old pirate ships, time travel and the writing of some story connecting the two that I thankfully can’t remember now but couldn’t stop thinking about then.

The next morning, I went to get checked out, where I discovered that being tested for flu involves having the world’s largest q-tip inserted into the back of your head via your nose (as pleasant as it sounds) and heard the thrilling phrases “I want to send you for a chest x-ray, your oxygen is low, and I think it might be pneumonia” — it isn’t — and “well, if the fever just started last night, you’re definitely infectious for the next three or four days.”

I’m writing this on day three now, lying in bed after an interrupted, coughing-filled night of sleep. I know I’m getting better, but I just wish it could happen that little bit faster. I’m so bored of being sick.

“You should let yourself feel anger or even rage about this,” my therapist said, and I thought, I’m not sure I even know what the difference is, but I feel one of those for sure. More than that, though, was the mixture of shock and utter lack of surprise.

Shock because, to be honest, doing what she did felt intentionally cruel to an unmistakable degree; if I’d been giving her the benefit of the doubt since the divorce — and I had, I think, if only because I couldn’t really comprehend that she was being mean as opposed to selfish in so many instances— then this was the wake-up call to tell me otherwise. There was no realistic reason what happened happened outside of cruelty. I hadn’t, really, expected that, I don’t think.

I also hadn’t expected it to happen then, like that; to me, the issue was unresolved and open, and we still had to talk about it. The last time I saw her, even — two weeks ago today exactly — I’d said that to her face, that we needed to sit down and talk about it. She’d said sure, which to my mind meant (means) agreement. I’m shocked, still, because I was literally expecting a discussion, a say, some kind of heads up. Instead, an email telling me after the fact that it had happened with no warning.

(Again, the feeling of, did she know even then that’s what would happen? Was the sure just a way to end the conversation for her?)

The utter lack of surprise comes from… I don’t know, the knowledge that, of course this was what was going to happen. From knowing that the selfishness and need to “win,” the need to hurt me was there if not all along, at least from the time she announced her plan in the first place. From remembering the horrible, shitty conversation in October where I tried to find out information and details and she said, sneering, that I don’t get a say and this is what happens when I leave, and if I wanted to, I could sue her because she’d never change her mind.

Thinking back to that conversation, of course she’d do this. Anything else would mean compromise or loss for her, and neither are acceptable, especially not in what she repeatedly calls her “new life.”

I do feel angry, and shocked, and not surprised. But more than anything, I feel so, so sad. And that, I suspect, was what she really wanted all along.