On Being Sick

A leaden lung, two timber legs. My back made from the earth, half-dollars for eyelids. Allow me this tiny attempt at poetry: I have been sick.

Woolf and Didion and others have written beautifully about illness, about the prison of the sick-bed and the horror of the congested head, but I can’t quote them now, because my fingers marching across the keyboard are marathon enough. To pick up a book, to bear the weight of all that ink on sheaves, might be deadly.

I’ll just try to relate what happened last night on top of our brand new sheet set from Wal-mart—army-white colored—which I’ve christened with my sickness. I lay there, sunken down, becoming part of the pillow top. For a moment I had the secret wish that someone would break into the house and brutally murder me, preferably with a sharpened kitchen knife, because to be stabbed would be something visceral, a pain to know, and though it would mean my end, to be finished on that note must certainly be more dignified than passing banally atop pressed army white. Mainframe brand. 200 thread-count. Orange tag clearance sale.

I don’t want to be murdered, not really. But there was a feeling last night, and it was that a force was pushing me into the earth. How low could I go? It felt a giant iron made for unwrinkling humans moved back and forth across my torso: up towards the head to help expel the breath, back down to the feet to secure another inhalation. Something mechanical and invisible in the ether was responsible for my every action and breath. I was alive because something I couldn’t even see said so.

Since I’ve been a grown-up I haven’t taken a sick day, soldiering forth through classes with tissues and Halls Vapor candy. This will likely happen again tomorrow. Something mechanical inside me will find words to say about Henry IV and the need for every person alive to know Shakespeare. But for now I’m of iron, I’m about iron, I’m even among and amongst iron. I am the heaviest human alive, and can see with surprising clarity each thread to count on these new sheets. Being sick often gives me fresh eyes. Still, though, I have a wrinkled stomach and lung and heart.