SICK DAYS + DAILIES

As a few of you know, my partner and I have spent about one week in some degree of petty, but debilitating, illness.

1ST, I seemed to have caught a cold that was not properly girded for battle with my savage immune system. It vanished in barely 30 hours.

NEXT, she caught the same cold (or so we thought!), which took her over completely for several days to follow. Lovely girl, alas, she does not have my constitution.

Or perhaps, I speak too soon, for IN THE MEANTIME, my cold unexpectedly returned, having honed its endurance upon my partner's not-so-distant shores. Overconfident, this cold once again succumbed to the swiftness and brutality of my immuno-response.

BUT THEN, her cold, enraged by the massacre of its kind abroad, transitioned from "annoying cough" to "tortuous sinuses." My partner was most displeased. Her emotional reaction was exaggerated, to humorous effect, by the surprising consequence of a well of internal pressure building within her facial passageways, namely, a rather ongoing secretion of tears.

AT LAST, she made it through the worst of it and returned to work after a 5-day weekend.

THAT IS UNTIL, a series of events still poorly understood led to an experience I should like to, but shall not soon, forget: the worst stomach ache of my entire life, four straight hours of indescribable agony for which she was present and empathetically co-suffering.

And so, with fingers crossed, Thursday marks the first day that our starting team is back on its feet.

Illustration below.

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DAILIES (1.17.2012)

Literally phoning this in.

DAILIES: (01.15.2013)

SOMETHING FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED

I saw an old friend in traffic the other day. I was on my bike—I slipped out of the west side of Forrest Park—when a rattle from my back wheel told me it was time to pull over and tighten a screw. I couched on the sidewalk with my back to the street but I was freaked out, before I got started, by a car horn. Feeling physically insecure near the curb, I quickly turned my head toward the commotion, even though it was already over. My friend was stopped there, two hands on the wheel in her dark Mazda, her sharp face straight forward and impatient with the red light at the intersection. There she was, back in my eye-line for the first time in months. If she had blown her horn, she regretted it now.

She had her heartbroken early last year. She took it very badly and, as the seasons slowly passed, was remade by her experience into someone very petty, unreliable, paranoid and cruel.

I could forgive her for allowing pain that much power. I am experienced in heartbreaks; I collected them as a younger man. One in particular often comes to mind and I am not ashamed to say that I handled it with dignity—that I took it, as I take all setbacks, as an opportunity for grace. Perhaps I also drank to excess, moaned about her to everyone in ear-shot, tarnished the beautiful girl's reputation and mine, worried my friends with frequent ruminations on our inevitable deaths and ran from the cops having screamed all night, drunk and violent to glassware in the middle of her street—and maybe that didn't happen. Maybe it was all just the dream that it feels like today.

All the while, I was gradually getting over it and coaching myself on some good advice:

• Know that one day you will be over it and that, in a year—or two, or five—your pain will feel distant, dreamlike and even a little romantic.
• Remember that there is more to a person than how they treated you. As much as you'd like to, you do not define them.
• Make note of the people you most love to make happy. They will be the best of your lovers and friends.
• And hold on tight to the idea that life's greatest pressures—for money, for love, for faith in our strengths despite evidence of absence, and the pressure to live a life worth remembering—are also our greatest motors of progress and maybe just another heartbreak or two beyond reach.