My Body Has Lodged A Formal Complaint

I am sick.

Not mildly unwell in that glamorous television way, where someone lies elegantly beneath a white doona with slightly tousled hair and a single tissue nearby.

I mean properly sick. The sort where your entire body appears to have held a meeting without you and unanimously voted to stop cooperating.

My head hurts. My body hurts. Even my hair feels unwell, and technically it’s already dead.

I had every intention of writing something clever today. Perhaps a thoughtful observation about modern society, politics, social media or another miraculous Facebook product apparently invented by a doctor nobody can locate.

But my brain has temporarily left the building.

At the moment, my greatest intellectual achievement is remembering where I put my drink. Occasionally, I find it. Unfortunately, by then I’ve forgotten why I wanted it.

Being sick also destroys your sense of time. You sleep for what feels like eight hours, wake up convinced it must be tomorrow and discover that seventeen minutes have passed.

Then you attempt to watch television, but following a plot requires resources you no longer possess. Somebody gets murdered, three detectives arrive and before long you realise you’ve been staring at the screen for half an hour without absorbing a single thing. By the end, you don’t know who the killer was, who died or whether you accidentally changed programs halfway through.

People tell you to rest, as though that is an activity you can perform successfully. You lie down. You sit up. You adjust the pillow. You remove the blanket because you’re hot, then drag it back because you’re freezing. You cough, complain and briefly consider whether this is simply your life now.

So that’s today’s blog.

There is no social commentary, no clever conclusion and no attempt to explain what is wrong with the world.

The world can remain wrong without my supervision for one day.

I am going back to bed.