Ill

        So your sick. And you want the world to call a time out. But it won’t, it won’t even stop the incessant spinning. It just turns ’round and ’round…and around–crap, just a second…..
        When I was young I would have these awful dreams while I was sick. Some were visions of actual people doing terrible things, and I would wake up sweaty and chilled calling out for my mother. Like one in which my brother is hung from a chain, above a bubbling pit of something I can’t quite make out. And I’m unable to help as these people in masks, whose voices I should recognize, taunt and tease me as the lower him in. But even worse were the dreams of abstract horror. Lumps of clay that flexed and remolded  itself in a bad stop- motion super 8, your stomach doing similar movements in your guts. Or my worst, which involved simple black lines that ‘fell’ from the top of the ’screen’ on to each other to the beat of my heart. I’ve never been able to explain why this scared me so, but it has to do with the half formed dream fears about who was controlling those lines, and therefore my heart. That’s one that would linger whole minutes after I was awake, making it difficult to calm down, chest pounding like a rabbit’s. Fight or flight.
     But now that I’m older, it’s the fear of the loss of time. I’ve got too much to do to be sick. It’s nightmares of the clock that haunt me these last few nights. Is it a.m. or p.m.? Was there someone I was supposed to call? And long fitful hours thrashing around in my sheets believing that I was on some job interview that had somehow devolved into a shouting match with the interviewer. Weird mindscapes of bus rides to no where and first days from hell. All with the head and body aches that make the fears somehow more real, more insistent.
     And the self pity flows like your nose. You used to have girlfriends that would bring you soup and rub your head, or at least pretended that they weren’t scared to death of catching what ever funk had claimed you. But you find yourself in between such arrangements, amongst many, and your sniffles go un-validated. No, it’s just you and the knowledge, now covered in snot, that this too shall pass. Yes just me and store brands of Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide , flavored (poorly) with cherry or… what ever flavor NyQuil is, trying to power through the mightiest of chest colds. Trying to put on a brave face and salvage something of this week. What do you mean there’s only 29 days in February? Who’s smart idea was that?