The Cold - part 1

I never get sick. Anyone who knows me, knows this about me. Because I say it to them: 'I never get sick.'
Even in stressful situations when everyone else is succumbing, I don't. I walk off international flights without a sniffle. Survived an intense job in a small air-conditioned building where in winter everyone shared the office cold. Except me. Tough as nails. Cast iron constitution. I am immune.

But not you, probably. You will be minding your own business, not even testing your immune system in any way, and you'll be blindsided by it.
Struck down.

Your friends will see it before you do. One day you'll be lethargic and they'll say you're looking snivelly, but you'll just blame the cold air - it always makes your nose run. You don't get colds, you'll say. However, your friends know you just have a selective memory.

And then you'll wake up the next morning feeling like shit.

Sickness is a thick milky wall that blocks and separates you from the rest of the world; Imprisons you in your own glutinous pain and a physical suffering that becomes mental suffering.

Resilience is reduced to zero as the entire body focusses on an internal battle–Germ warfare–and all resistance is needed for this.
There is nothing else in your world but snot, phlegm and blood, discomfort and terrible lethargy; The smallest actions become a massive effort.
Like breathing.
Illness presses you right down to the floor and keeps you there, defeated and helpless, passive and beaten. It sucks out your motivations and passions, along with your muscles and bones.

Your sense of humour died somewhere between the third sleepless night and the first nosebleed. You're vulnerable, over-sensitive and small slights become massive personal insults. It feels like the worst, even while you know it's not; it's only a cold. But anything worse would surely be the utter pits.

So, you wonder how you would possibly manage if you were transplanted now to Pakistan: Your house is underwater, you need to carry your dying family to a boat, to dry land, where you will sit in the hot sun, with no water, waiting for something you aren’t even sure will come.
How would you survive that from inside this foggy wall of self obsession and self pity?

That pain in your head feels like your brain hardening, the neural fluids turning into thick green mucus. Blinking is an effort. An army of Lilliputian germs have pinned you down and you feel you've given in all too easily to the state of homebound inertia you find yourself in. If your body was an emotion it would be depressed, downtrodden.

The simplest thought is a struggle. Try to avoid making decisions.

You move in slow motion. Everything is in slow motion. The day lasts forever.
Move too fast and bits of you slosh around, pressing at your skin.
You didn't know your eyeballs could ache.

You didn't know you could be driven to such a tragically melodramatic mindset.

...the tragic melodrama continues...