recovered

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For days I’ve been living the life of a convalescent. It’s a strange life for someone who runs at high speeds like me. There are moments of happy nonchalance: the dinner prepared by the man I live with, the little tyrannies: screaming as you turn page 125 of a divine novel, “Will you bring me some cookies that I like when you get home are you going?” to the supermarket?!”. It’s a glorious return to the position of someone who asks without guilt. Days begin with the comforting reassurance that symptoms are easing, the body is filled with a phosphorescent energy. But there are moments of open desperation when the cough returns, when the ghost of the vanished fever lowers its claws, when exhaustion sets its machinery in motion just two hours after waking up.Now I live this silly routine while friends everywhere ask me how I’m doing. “This affection for someone like me, so reserved, so grumpy, so ghostly, it confuses me. Twice a day I call my father. He’s recovering too: he went over a fence, he fell, he hurt his shoulder. Her need to immobilize your right arm for a few weeks we are like a generational bridge damaged on both ends he tells me about his contortions putting on vo n shirts, his strategies for brushing his teeth with his left hand. He listens to me: “Today I have a fever, yesterday I didn’t”; I listen to him: “Today it hurt less”. I remember in childhood when my mother would occasionally show up in the room to ask if I wanted broth, or more magazines, or a few books, always with the convincing face of someone conveying a clear message: “Me am your medicine, you go and have a good time”. But my mother is dead. Now every time I talk to my father I think that we live outdoors and I wonder who takes care of us. And I tell myself what I always knew: Nobody. We take care of ourselves.