You give me fever

The most inappropriate post title possible, but then, there it is: I have got fever. My head hurts, my shoulders are stiff, and I can barely move without feeling my rusty limbs revolt in denial. I have got fever.

When I was a kid I used to love being sick. I mean not for anything else, but for the attention lavished on me, the feeling of being pampered-- my grandparents doting on me, Dad coming home early from work, Ma rustling up little delicacies...I miss those days. I miss home, miss Ma, miss the seven huge windows of what used to be my bedroom in a house lived in long ago, miss the shadowy hieroglyphics on the walls. I miss, I miss, I miss...

I have always wondered at the generosity of people who are ill and infirm. I know why in stray bits and pieces at times like this. Sickness is far-sighted. You know how that one hurt here, the other humiliation there, that accidental wound tucked away in a quiet, forgotten corner, do not really matter. You know it when the psychedelic glow of the fever wears off in a mass of inertia. You feel them heal themselves, those festering bruises of the soul.

The wicker lampshade is on in the room, but it's hurting my eye. Tried sleeping without it, but that's putting me ill at ease.The darkness is exploding in a thousand pinpricks of light-showers when I do that. I want to sleep. Badly.

But in a certain masochistic way, I am enjoying the heat that envelopes my body. It makes me feel vitally aware of the life pulsing within, the sensation that life is in this moment. Now.

And all of yesterday is a prism. And all of tomorrow a cryptogram.

I am rambling. Wish me a speedy recovery.