You know, after you’ve been sick for a few days and kind of out of it on Nyquil and tissues, when the world has been kind of gray and dark? You under your covers, praying that your faucet of a nose shuts off soon and you can go merrily on your way, back to things like working out, and breathing normally, and not sounding like a Snufalupagus?
Then you go outside for the first time in a few days, and the world actually blinds you with its brilliance? The trees sparkle like someone has dumped glitter on them, and the sun is astoundingly bright, and you can’t remember ever seeing houses that looked like that, or cars, or road signs? And while part of you knows you’re hallucinating like some Gitmo’d detainee on a 3-day pass, you don’t care, because you’re out in the world and seeing it the way it probably always is, if you care to notice on any given day?
I fucking love it when that happens.
I left the house for the first time in a few days today, and was brought to my knees again and again by how couples looked loading groceries into their cars, or how women leaving a church after a wedding in their tropical bird-hued dresses laughed, or how a man holding hands with his little son looked down at him when the child wasn’t looking, his eyes filled with love.
Jesus H. My heart’s in my throat already.
Maybe we should all get a little “sick” sometimes, take ourselves off the life support of whatever takes our attention away from these moments, when we see the word, looking so damn bright and amazing in all its radiance. I suggest everyone try it at least once.
I can’t stand being sick. Not that anyone really likes it, per se, but I am just not good if I can’t be in motion somehow. I like to be active, get things done, achieve creative goals and move my energy on a consistent basis. So when I am told in no uncertain terms by my body (I do listen, I just have to be told pretty firmly) to take a load off, I slow down. I rest. I do my thing and try to get better, but my mind tends to focus on all I’m not getting done just the same. It’s hard to enjoy the resting time (the tissues piling up around the bed may have something to do with that). Maybe silly, but true.
So I began to realize that all of us have signed up for this — all of it, all the time. We’ve signed up for having our hearts broken, and that awkward first kiss, and even that health scare that made us almost turn vegan in college. We signed on for that C in Organic Chemistry, even though it made us have to change our major, and that casual sexual encounter with the foreign exchange student, and the layover in Amsterdam that caused what, in retrospect, was probably a mild dose of alcohol poisoning.
We signed on for laughing so hard our faces felt like falling off, and dancing until our skirt ripped, and holding hands on 9/11, and looking into the casket at our grandfather’s funeral and feeling like he could wake up at any minute, his soul was that close.
We signed on for this and we signed on for that, and we even signed on, from time to time, for a little bitty old cold. So it’s probably best to catch up on magazine reading and dream about the things I’ll do when I’m feeling better. The things I’ll be able to taste again.
Quick post tonight because I’m hip deep in a cold and can’t seem to reframe the copious amounts of mucous coming out of me, and the sheer boredom of being sick. I am a terrible sick person — just ask my husband!
More tomorrow, and hopefully by then I will have figured out how to relax into it and just let my body heal.
My throat is scratchy and I feel like I’m getting sick. I guess this detox stuff is working, right down to the molecules I’m releasing through my pores and breath. More tomorrow.
Time for sleep and hopefully some more releasing while unconscious. :)
