a description of the past three weeks

You begin your mornings in silence; with a breath of air and hope against hope that this moment of peace will last. Hope is the thing with feathers. You remember that line from an old poem. You never understood it, not really, but lying in bed with the sun shining softly and birdsong in the distance, you do. Because it flies away, and the tickle in your dry throat is back and you are coughing. You are drowning, you are coughing. And this is how your day begins.

From somewhere deep within you, your lungs are working to expel the phlegm that has settled in your chest; like pumping water from a well. And when you cough, you press your hand to your aching ribs. You think to yourself, perhaps you have pneumonia, and the old fear comes back. Outside, it rains, dripping incessantly. Light, steady drops of rain like a leaking faucet. The air is cold. You wrap yourself in a feather-patterned shawl and think warm thoughts. Hot soup. Your throat twitches with thirst, and you trip over an invisible truce-line and the battle in your body rages on. You are coughing again, the sound like hard, staccato shots.

An injured bird, a withered arm. You carry yourself so gingerly, so carefully, as if the slightest puff of cold wind will kill you. You are half-convinced this is so. There is a pain, a dark pain in the ribs as swollen and tender as if you've broken one. You are a broken porcelain doll, fragile and frail, your limbs are tired. Your body is a burden you tenderly carry around. And so you lay in bed, feeling the effects of the medicine circulating round your body. You have a scarf wrapped around your throat and two blankets. Your hands are so still. You are too tired to move. That is how the hours run by, in deep and dreamless sleep. When you wake up, night has come, and your hands are in the same position, numb and asleep. Your throat works, and it remembers, and you are wracked with a coughing fit as you push the heavy blankets away and your leaden limbs scramble their way out the room.

So cold. The air is cold. Outside, the rain falls in sheets that slush under car tires and whisper against the trees. A quiet, steady falling. As you are, as you are, as you are.

You are nothing. nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. Another poem from another lifetime. A love poem. your slightest look easily will unclose me. Some flowers unfurl in the rain. Rain lilies. But you are not a flower, only human, and unwell. And so you curl into yourself and pretend, desperately, that if you are still enough, you are nothing. Not even sick.