Sickness

Last night I overdid it. I was still feeling under the weather, but the dude who is staying with our housemates asked us out for nargile, and he is a pretty cool dude (evidenced that the three of us talked for a good amount of time about child-raising techniques and multi-national children without him freaking out about the concept of having children), so I figured that I could handle it. I thought that I would just not smoke very much, and enjoy the conversation. But how easy is it to deny the only type of smoking that my body will let me engage in? Besides, I have been on the upswing of being sick for over a week now. I thought I could handle a night out.

Unfortunately I couldn’t.

After a week of being very sick, and a week of nursing myself at an annoying state of slightly-sick, I am back to being very sick. Fever, swollen tonsils, generally phlegmy grossness. It has gotten to that point where I have forgotten what it feels like to be healthy- to have energy and not have my body hurt. It is as if that is just some fairy tale that isn’t actually possible in reality. I know, being sick for two weeks is not like some chronic illness, but that is my limit for physical memory, I think. That is not to say that I don’t remember significant physical sensations from the past, but the amount of time that it takes for me to create a new schema around my current state of being seems to be about two weeks. I assume that applies to more than just being sick. Changing my levels of activity with swimming, running, or biking… two weeks of doing it every day and it starts to feel normal. I adjust. Two weeks without my lover, and I adjust back to being non-cuddled. But then it takes two weeks before I forget what it feels like to sleep alone.

They say that it takes about 28 days to create a new habit- they also say that you can never actually break a habit, but only create new alternatives to that habit. It seems to me that my timeline is much closer to two weeks. The world did not exist before two weeks ago. I stop and think about that- consider it- and suddenly my entire understanding of history and memory changes. It pulls me into the moment- into the now- and makes me very much appreciate my life. There is no sense in living in a past that you cannot feel any longer, is there? Except for one thing, and that is a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, my body is capable of not aching, my throat is capable of making noises less like the croaking of a frog, and my head is capable of clear thought. Maybe I am energetic and happy. I vaguely, through a very distant fog, seem to remember those possibilities…