The Peppermint Vigil

Since Thursday I’ve been lying in bed surrounded by used tissues, slowly eating everything within arm’s reach and tormenting the internet with my constant presence. Some mutant hybrid of flu, cold, and bronchitis that apparently can’t be touched by antibiotics. The room smells of peppermint oil and hot ginger tea with honey, which sounds nicer than it is when you’re on day four of actively considering whether death might be preferable.

I missed two good parties this weekend. That’s the part that actually stings. Every woman I spoke to this week made some version of the same observation—that men are pathetic when sick, that we turn a minor inconvenience into a dramatic production. Fine. Guilty. But in my defense, this production has been running four days with no sign of closing, so at some point the melodrama becomes proportionate. The women who delivered that verdict have since stopped calling anyway—half of them are on a class trip to Prague, the other half couldn’t tolerate my response to their complaints about how terrible life is, which was sustained, low, and expressly non-sexual groaning.

Half of Berlin seems to be going through something similar. Gülcan told me earlier she’s got a stomach thing. We’re all falling apart in tandem, which at least makes it feel less personal. Every aspirin and Grippostad C I’ve thrown at this has done approximately nothing. The one thing that actually made a dent was biting into a cold green apple—a whole one—which I can’t explain and don’t need to. It worked. That’s enough.