The Cold - part 3

(The final part of a sad and sorry saga)

The face-closed people pass in all directions, on purposeful trajectories, with no time for interruption or distraction. You see yourself in them. And you see how annoying it would be to have a stranger jam a flyer in your face. 'Butt out of my life. Keep your opinions to yourself. I'm busy on my way to somewhere.' You are reminded once again why you never went into politics, or advocacy, or any of those fields that require you to hold a belief so doggedly that you could force it on other people too. You realise the root of your terrible shyness lies somewhere in an empathetic belief, false or not, that people mostly just want to be left alone

After half an hour–that feels like 2 hours and is probably more like 20 minutes–you think you've successfully given away a fair number, but your bag is still full of flyers. Your head is filling with mucus. You need to take your poor sick sorry self back home. On the way you manage to leave a couple at a health food store, and another few at the bike shop, where they're friendly and open to it at least, but the pile is not shrinking. You are beginning to strongly suspect they sent you 200 flyers, instead of the 100 they promised.

So now you're back home and because you made a promise, have an obligation, you resort to the final cowardly option. You drag yourself around the neighbourhood, in a foggy groggy bubble, getting rid of the flyers into letterboxes, and even this–though you are scrupulous about respecting the No Junk Mail signs–feels like a small intrusion.

The street is the deck of a ship on an uncertain ocean, and you think you're listing slightly as you walk. You motivate yourself to keep going, with the belief that just one, maybe two, people will be happy to find the flyer. 'Thank god, I wouldn't have known about this otherwise.' You remember the lady you met at a party after last year's rally. She was annoyed and disappointed that it hadn't been publicised better, wished she hadn't missed it. If you can have reached just two people then this won't have been a waste of time.

And now the job is done, you're home, sitting down, It's just you and your symptoms and nothing else is real.

I feel for you, I really do. It sounds horrible, but I can't really imagine what it must feel like because, you see, I never get sick.