[832] Pooled

I hate getting sick. It's something that's both inevitable, and for me, seemingly intolerable. It's one thing to feel weak or helpless, and another to be thrust into a pool that drowns you in thoughts and feelings about how weak and helpless you are. It's realizing how little certain thoughts matter to me or how willing I am to start negotiating the terms of my surrender. Something like a sore throat is the nagging cat scratching at every swallow, erasing the pleasure of taste. A head pounding says sit, stand, or lay down, it's no matter it will pull on the muscles around your brain and eyes until you can't see or think.

In truth, it's hard for me to piece together what to make of my “thoughts” when I'm severely ill. It's one long dream-like state of delirious pain, reacting to the chills or sweating per my body aches and heaves. I really wanted help. At bottom, just someone to like bear witness that I wasn't over or under reacting to what was happening. You don't really know how bad you have it, and sometimes until it's too late to do anything. Every scowl and laughable question about, “Who dies from the flu?” becomes less funny. Not that I have more evidence than not to suggest I was about to die, but the question rings louder the more isolated and without the necessary resources you are.

Sickness is memorable for me. I was thinking about what makes something memorable, and the severity of the change in my disposition certainly counts. I know the “differentness” of not eating for several days at a time. I know how foreign it feels to not be able to put two thoughts together for longer than snapshots of time. I know how empty and hopeless and desperate I am to just black out until it's all over. The physical nature of it sucks enough, but the mental is what elevates it to the next level. Who am I when nothing matters but the writhing and rocking of my legs or emptying my body of every last drop of bile? Where do you want to go but down when you can't see or hold yourself up straight?

And then how do we bother to understand or share sickness? In truth, I don't get sick often beyond annoying colds or tension headaches. The big ones stand out for their ability to completely incapacitate save a fledgling ability to drag myself to the bathroom. Our first instinct is to offer “help” and also simultaneously be a little suspicious, no? How sick is sick? Too sick to work? How do you have to sell and explain yourself so you're not punished on top of being sick for not living up to your responsibilities? How desperate and persuasive do you have to be to be accepted back into the ranks after being such a burden to your cohort or family? I think this is a fairly unique American instinct.

In any event, even while I consider myself on a path to be able to squirrel away the resources to be able to account for my inevitable sickness, universal healthcare or not, there's still all the time in between. There's still the injuries I'm begging for and car accidents don't stop just because you had one recently. The same afternoon I got a hole dug for a pool, I went from perfectly healthy, to exploding in a few hours. Which aspect of my day will feel the most memorable? The excitement at the prospect of a future swim spot, or the drama and pain? I think they'll be about equal. I think they'll be equal because of the irony underlying how life works. You have to work and affirm and overcome to match the default pain and suffering that comes with existing at all. That's what makes it bearable and makes you want to keep living when you've lost all direction and hope.

When I started to feel like my shit was coming back together, figuratively and literally, I wanted to get the laundry done, get my car dropped off to be worked on, and compile the medicine I'd hopefully have on hand in case the next disaster strikes. Whatever hell you're experiencing doesn't have to be the end of the story or definitive in any way beyond how it's made you better prepared or appreciative of the health or security you're currently enjoying. For as often as life seems it's trying to humble me lately, I keep insisting I couldn't really be sitting any prettier than if I were able to layabout and arbitrarily invest unlimited time and money.

I guess there's also the sense that say I did randomly die, it would have been on the day I moved forward with another thing I said I wanted to do, have a pool, and I'll be dammed if there isn't a gaping hole in the ground not 30 feet from me. I need shows of good faith from myself as much or moreso than I do from others. You can't say I'm not trying, even if it looks less prepared or pretty than you imagine the process should take. If all I know how to do is move in the world one expenditure at a time (given the frivolity of the hearts and minds approach), well, feel free to stop in and stare at the latest attraction.

I still don't feel 100%. I don't feel “bad,” but I feel like modest effort beyond basic ambling from one place to the next is going to provoke the kind of huffing carrying my laundry yesterday did. My mouth hasn't returned to normal; it's got that dry opaque “medicine feel” like it's been hollowed out and numb waiting for permission to be a thing my brain can ignore until it's been bitten. My day is flirting with feeling like a “waste,” which again testifies to how suspiciously I/we might think about recuperating and rest. I'm hoping any remote insight or subconscious shift that might've taken place manifests over the next few weeks. It was literally impossible to string together thoughts that weren't basic survival/cleanliness instincts, but I distinctly remember how little a shit I gave about topics that did pass through, if not what those topics were explicitly.