The flu week

I went down on a Monday and stayed down through Thursday. Not a picturesque collapse, just a fever that made the ceiling swim and a throat that felt lined with sandpaper. I kept a glass of water on the nightstand and watched the light move across the far wall. That was the work of the week.

The neighbour from the floor below came by on the second afternoon with a pot of soup. She set it inside the door, took two steps back, and said she would knock again tomorrow. I did not blame her. The smell of the soup reached the bed before I did. I ate it lukewarm from a mug because standing at the stove felt like a negotiation I would lose.

By day three the fever had loosened its grip and boredom took its place. I tried the shortwave for half an hour and got mostly static and a man speaking too fast in a language I could not place. I sorted the books on the floor by height and then put them back the way they were. I counted the stitches in the hem of the black cardigan I had slept in. None of it amounted to anything.

There is no neat turn at the end of a flu week. On Friday I washed my hair and burned the first pot of coffee in the cezve because my hands were still slow. The apartment smelled like burnt grounds and leftover soup. I sat by the window in clean socks and waited for the ordinary noise of the building to sound like itself again. That was as much recovery as I managed.