CALL it the sickness pompous, the spell that hushed the household with desert-like stillness felt through its innermost chambers; one in a world unto herself — her own theater.
A swerve fit of indisposition under the name of a fall from dignity (or careless demeanor) amounting to a deposition that made me a prisoner of me, in pain and grief, for some days now.
But the state of sickness is but a magnificent dream to lie in bed, with the daylight curtains drawn to shut out the sun, in a total oblivion of all the works going under it, and become insensible of all the operations of life under it, except the beating of our feeble pulse and the agonizing wait for a phone or doorbell to ring that never did.
Can this be her? This creature of news, of chat, of anecdote, of everything except physique? Newspapers always excite curiosity, yet no one ever lays one down, without a feeling of disappointment.
Sickness enlarge dimensions of one’s self — to herself, to become her own exclusive object; in the regal solitude of the sick bed where caprices are without control over the catalogue of moans and strong armor of sickness; wrapped in the callous hide of suffering, sympathy and correct compassion. It would seem to be your only rise, not to be insulted with soothing fictions.
Then, as you backtrack, you recall that morning sickness; knowing, it will be months again before you can see your toes.
Strapped down and delivered into in a place where pain winces off the walls, that doctor bearing down like a foreman to this sweating laborer, forcing one life from another. It’s something I’ve signed for at that moment when I would have signed anything! “Give it up!” says a bad wit. “Push!,” orders the nurse.
She’s crowning the doctor says, but there’s no one royal but this barefoot peasant, greeting a barefoot infant. In that puzzle of sickness, how can anything so beautiful come from so much pain? Never again (till the next time around), but I did FOUR!
And what of this small truce called remission, that shaky dance of pretense, knowing that the pulse in our own wrists is ticking away while the body waits, having waged war on itself for years. But the heart will lead, and the head will explain, for the common pathway is the heart, whatever kingdom may come. And what matters finally is how the human spirit is spent: every morning is the day of joy…the morning to rejoice, for it is the beginning.
Yet to be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives: from the bed of sickness, to the elbow chair of healing, a scene of one’s regalities. Hushed are those mysterious sighs, those groans that are so much more awful, not knowing from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they preceded.
And into this flat swamp of healing, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terrains of established health; notes reach me — requests, summons, deadlines, something hard. The quibble relieves me, for it seemed to link me again to the petty business of life, which I had lost sight of: a gentle call to activity, however trivial, awake once more from the preposterous dream of self absorption and puffy stuff of sickness, in which I have stayed long and had spread over. The conundrum of sickness that swells contemplation of one’s suffering, wasted to a span of giant self-importance of which I was so periled lately.
Now, I am once again in my natural pretensions — the same old woman, of lean and meager figure, your insignificant columnist. Writing occasional sentences that shimmer on its own, with freedom in expressing whatever narcissistic nonsense that would come within one’s kin: taking pleasure in the show or rapid movements of my pen — as I write with my hand.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
