SOS

It's day 3 in my sick bed, vise around my head, pain at my throat and chest, weaving in and out of delirium. Scenes fast forward and rewind in my brain as I wind in and out of consciousness. The only way to avoid the nausea is to curl up in the fetal position and ride out the wave. I awaken to discover hours have gone missing.

Life bubs along without me as I lie alternately sweaty and chilly in my bed listening to the sounds of the blithering vaporizer. Sometimes I swear I hear voices, music, streaming out of its chute.

I contemplate what it would look like to go missing, to pass on, what that might do to current tangents in my life. I contemplate my family, our home, the school I've devoted so much work on, the mess that is my office, the piles of plans I've made and evacuated. Pebble drops into water...rings reverberate outward, silently. Silently.

Hard to see it, my little pebble, except in the immediate sense of familiar obligation. Like I'm tethered because of them, otherwise I would let go. Release all.

I told my husband last week I couldn't sleep in because if I did, I would never wake up. But when I was mocking sleep, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind. My body, pushed pedal to the metal for months on end, has finally broken down. Enough. It's been years really, since I've had decent--what they call restorative--sleep. I may never get out of bed.

Except the irony is, all this sleep is now being used to fight off the evil in my body, not the lost time, the deficit I've collected for years.

When I said I was going to take a soft retreat, take on no more obligations, this is hardly what I had in mind.