Getting Better

Last week I was sick. Like really sick. It was probably just a cold, I think, but the pain and suffering that I experienced didn't seem to adequately fit into such a simple four letter word as the word "cold." It was all sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, I-just-want-my-mom kind of sick, and it was awful.

Then on Tuesday morning, right in the eye of my congestive storm, I had to wake up early and walk a mile to go babysit the only baby I've ever met who doesn't cry. Thank God. She slept a lot too, and so did I. After 8 hours of feeling like my death was near, I left the Park Slope townhouse and stepped into a Brooklyn downpour with no umbrella. Too cheap to take a taxi, I convinced myself to walk a few blocks and take a bus instead. I hung my head and powered through the rain only to be stopped at a red light next to a very friendly 60-year-old black man with silver whiskers who asked to take me out to dinner. With a voice sounding like an aged smoker, I told him, "Thanks, but I have a boyfriend." He looked visibly startled when he heard my voice and saw my face up close. Thankfully the light turned green at that same moment.

I was almost entirely soaked several blocks later when I saw the bus pull up to the stop, and so I mustered what little strength I had left and sprinted to the bus full of people that had just watched me pathetically sprint Pheobe Buffet-style in the rain. I made it inside the bus, took a deep breath, and 2 blocks later realized I was on the wrong bus going in the wrong direction. I got off, and walked the rest of the way home in the rain. When I got back to my Kleenex sponsored bedroom, I made my bed before I crawled into it, and I found two cough drops stuck in the sheets. So exhausted and miserable, I fell into a cold comma.

And then I slept for two days (only occasionally waking up for tea and to watch the newest episode of New Girl).

But then this crazy thing happened!
I got better!
I woke up one morning and I could breath and for the first time in a week, I actually wanted to get out of bed. I had a kind of revelation that like, whoa, my body healed itself. Like all on its own! It was a good reminder that even when I'm at my lowest, getting hit on in the rain and taking the wrong bus and finding cough drops in between my sheets, even when everything is going terribly wrong, one day, it just gets better.