💌 Notes from a sick day 💌

No sleep, more quiet

When I tell my mom my symptoms, she suggests it’s exhaustion. Like, medical exhaustion. That my body is suffering self inflicted harm and forced me into a 96-hour chilled-to-the-bone feverish flu so that I’ll sit down and listen to it. 

I disagree, I must have caught this virus somewhere in the city. It’s New York’s fault, not mine. 

It’s absolutely dystopian to consider illness as rest, but I’m worried those are the walls I’ve built around myself. Or the world I live in. Illness as rest is as if my weakened immunity and zombie symptoms are blessings, sighs of relief to slow down, stay in bed, and the best part, I tell myself: no one is allowed to get mad! I’m lucky to lie here in pain. 

I pride myself on how much kinder I treat myself these days, far better off than I used to be. But still, it’s forced. It isn’t my natural rhythm of things yet. A habit I’m still breaking, so I fall back down all the time in different ways. 

I’m sick of analyzing, sick of thinking about the holes inside me and oh, what I could do if they weren’t there. I want to simply feel the joys of the world around me wildly. I want to stop feeling so sick. So very, very sick. A sobering sickness. A mortal sick strapping all my limbs into a heavy contortion of sagging melancholy dragging against the pavement.