There’s a sort of emotional relief in a nasty flu. Somewhere amid all the throbbing, hacking, sweating and occasionally wishing for death (or, at least, forced hibernation), you realize that you’ve finally reached a deep quiet. The germs pillaging your healthy cells have shut down the unnecessary sections of your brain, the ones that run daily life, leaving your body fully committed to shedding the organic poison flooding its organs. All that mental churning and bellowing, the incessant chatter in your head that never stops muttering about how much you did wrong today, may have done wrong yesterday, probably will do wrong tomorrow - all of it silenced, to divert full energy to three basic steps:
1. Get out of bed
2. Retrieve Kleenex, Tylenol and juice
3. Return to bed
In that space, with an inferno in your larynx and a steel clamp in your muscles, there is no “should have,” no disappointment, no niggling voice always ready to tell you precisely what’s wrong with everything in your life. It’s a peaceful reprieve from your own head, to the point that, once you’re fully recuperated and thrust back into the clamoring bustle of real life, you almost miss it.
Almost.