It was my turn today, and it was not great. I woke up and knew it was on my back and ready to twist me around into some sort of wrestling lock. So I spent the whole day on the couch, other than the parts where I stumbled over to the toilet to puke. Fewer times than Abby, but it was violent and just no fun whatsoever. I couldn’t keep water down, and at a certain point the overlap between the illnesses was treating me strange. Did I feel bad because of the virus? Or did I feel bad because I puked up my dinner from last night and hadn’t had anything to drink all day, well, nothing tha stayed down. 

It was a drag. I watched a horror movie, then a sad movie. The horror movie was when I felt worse, which made the horror worse. The sad movie I felt more acutely also. 

Phantom Thread is perhaps my favorite film, that’s to do with a lot of things but perhaps the most significant part is the truth in what illness does to a man and to his partner, or to him in the eyes of his partner, or to himself as he percieves himself to be in the eyes of his partner, and thus how he behaves, to lean into those expectations. 

I’m no Reynaulds Woodcock, but I do think that being sick often does something good for me. It gives me insight, and it helps me think about how I’ll be when I’m old and sick all the time. Sickness is the canvas color we’ll scratch through, and we ought to think about how we’ll show up on that field of color. 

I didn’t do as good a job praying through it as I might’ve liked. Mostly I looked at my phone and watched movies and groaned in agonized discomfort without much capacity for consideration or contemplation. 

Next time though.