Out In The Ether of a Dissipating Virus

Walking four or five blocks to the post and back brings winded breathing and droopy eyes. Turning my head is too quick for my vision and it takes a beat to catch up, swimming dizziness from my forehead to my chest. My legs are squishy. Not weak, not wobbly. Squishy. Almost as if they work without my permission. One foot in front of the other, my chest filling and emptying with nearly every step, my dizzy head light and effervescent.

There's a dreaminess to it all. Is it real? I notice my many mistakes at the keyboard because my fingertips joined my squishy legs and work without guidance from me.

My head aches. Probably because of the sickness but maybe because I was careless yesterday and whacked it on an open cabinet door. Maybe both. That's the unrealness I'm talking about. It's all a dream.

My chest is knit together like a tapestry of ill gains. One more giant cough and all the poison will come out and I'll be fine. But the giant cough comes and goes and pounds against my temples and burns against my throat. Not as bad as it was, but bad enough. And, there it is again, dizzy edges blurring fact and fiction.

I'm tired. My aching body longs to climb back into bed and sleep. If only I could suspend time. Sleep without losing minutes. I'm thirsty. But water makes me pee. I shouldn't worry about that. I should stay hydrated. But it's so much work.

Eventually I'll get hungry. I suppose that's a good sign. If I weren't hungry things would be much worse. How long can I survive on this's and that's and hope the virus gets the hint? Feed a cold, starve a fever? Or, the other way around? I never figured that one out, though I'm blessed to be feaverless. There's that.

Sometimes my dizzy head clears up and everything clarifies. Notebook at my elbow, phone across the table, fire litigation that needs something. Not sure what. That's a lot of work too. But, when it does clear up my energy spikes and I want to do it all. Emails to answer, stories to scribble, agents to solicit. It's been days since I was able to sing. Normally that would make me crazy but this time it's different. I plug in my headphones and play against the backdrop of some backing track. Maybe I'm growing up. Maybe.

Once again I'm left with the perennial question -- soldier through or give myself a break? Even if I could soldier through it might not be the best idea. Virus changes the equation. It's not building stamina, it's breaking down reserves.

To be fair I feel infinitely better than I did two days ago. Two days? Has it really only been two days? What am I complaining about? Two or three miserable days in the course of a life well lived?

It's not really complaining, I tell myself. It's the experience. The dizziness. The fatigue. The numbness in hands and legs. Independent movement that surprises even me. It's feeling something so foreign it's foreign. In a world compact and crushed foreign is a lost art. The art of feeling -- something different, something real, something imaginary. All at the same time. An antidote to the vitriolic and poisonous assault on our senses screaming from screens of every ilk.

I didn't set out to dizzy myself. I was on a mission. I wanted to mail a letter. Not so very strange, but in this new normal very strange indeed. It's off to a place unseen and I'm back to my cubbyhole. Tired. Weak, but not too. Dizzy, but just. And getting better.