It has been nine days since I became ill last Friday. Amazing how one minute I was happy and laughing, talking on the phone with a friend and a few minutes later confined to a rut that ran between my bed and the bathroom. Chained so totally by commode and trashcan that I saw nothing else for the next two days.
Withered and drained by beasts as insidious as any dragon ever could have been, I found myself burned up and charred, a mere husk of myself unwilling to leave the apartment for nearly five days after returning from my sister’s.
It is amazing how my surroundings altered themselves to fit my state. What had been a bright sunny set of rooms became surrounded by cold and rain, fog and chill. Blinds drawn against the invasion of these things only forced the room to begin contracting as if it too wanted to get away. Everything was murky, dim, uncomfortably cold unless I carried the portable heater around with me.
The electric baseboard heaters which made me sick last spring began insinuating themselves back into my lungs shortly after being revived this winter and the portable heater reaches out with its heavy sinuous cord trying to wrap itself around my ankles and trip me!
My knitting needles join the conspiracy, knotting up so that any work is impossible. Today I sneaked out and went to the post office, but when I returned the closet did not want to accept my jacket and I had to hang it on the chair by the keyboard. A few more inches of precious space gone and my heart begins to beat louder as the silence grows!
Tomorrow I am going to get my hair cut and then go to a Christmas party in the evening because I find myself starting to dream of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper!
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