The Ceiling Gets Lower Every Hour

Fake swine flu. That’s what I’m going with. The symptoms are identical—the snot, the aching, the general sense of impending death—but I refuse to grant it the dignity of the real thing. My body staged a coup on the one weekend I actually wanted to be somewhere.

Being sick has this awful double structure where the symptoms and the treatment are the same thing. You have to lie in bed all day, and the punishment for being sick is also lying in bed all day. The fridge sits there looking obscenely full. The ceiling is a centimeter lower than it was this morning. You know—with complete certainty—that everyone else is out doing exactly what you wanted to do, getting drunk, climbing on top of each other, getting incrementally closer to whatever it is people are getting closer to on Saturday nights.

So you improvise. I cleaned the apartment with clinical thoroughness. I ate cake and tuna in quantities that were probably medically ill-advised. I watched numbers refresh on a screen. I made my way through several episodes of a children’s mystery show I have no business watching. I spent a serious amount of time trying to find an MMO that would run on my Mac—discovered Eve Online, clicked through two full hours of tutorial just to shoot one enemy ship, then uninstalled it and went back to Plants vs. Zombies. I studied Japanese vocab. I popped pimples. I flirted online with some deeply unhinged emo kids who had nothing better to do either, which felt appropriately pathetic. I waited for snow that wasn’t coming.

None of it helped. The walls stayed exactly where they were. Now I have to drag my infected body to the nearest supermarket because I’ve eaten and drunk everything in the apartment, which means the only thing my quarantine produced was an empty fridge and a memorized TV schedule. Useful skills, both.