sleeping sickness

Home sick. When I was a kid, I hated staying home sick. Would not stay home sick. I was a weird kid and hated getting behind in schoolwork. I also hated having to call a classmate for the homework assignments, even kids I considered my friends. My mom would sometimes have to force me to stay home when I was really sick.

Now that I'm in theory a responsible adult, I'm responsible for my own health and sometimes have to channel my mom to make myself stay home. This time around, I reminded myself that I want to go visit my best friend at the end of the week, and a cross-country flight will be horrible if I have to do it congested and achy. Plus, I just felt exhausted and achy this morning, despite having gone to bed somewhat early last night. So I'm home today.

I hate being sick. I cannot imagine that anyone really enjoys being sick (well, munchausen's suffers maybe, but that's another thing altogether), but I feel completely powerless and my brain becomes mush. I become functionally nonfunctional. However, I do perversely enjoy the utterly exhausted feeling of being sick--the one where my body feels unbelievably heavy and leaden. Where my muscles ache just a bit and my brain is so foggy that a slow, sluggish slide into sleep feels perfectly welcome.

I love that moment where I feel my mind and body shutting down for the evening. Falling asleep is so abrupt. I like the journey and conscious knowledge of sleep--the increasing weirdness of my thoughts and how one connects to the next are testaments to the peculiarities of my mind. At this point I can take control and wake myself up by trying to retrace my thoughts--what was the catalyst for the reverse oscillating sine wave?--or I can surrender to where my brain wants to go, deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.

Going to sleep is interesting enough when well, but when I've got a cold, I revel in the nighttime-specific meds that render my mind as congested as my nose and head. Weird thoughts become odder; heavy muscle aches become heavier. My head becomes foggier, but unlike during the day, when I need my brain to work, nighttime head-cloudiness is welcome, signaling the onset of relief from congestion and discontent for another few hours.