Maybe not all. Have sickness when travel does not play well. There’s no gun for hire to eclipse it, to shoot it all out of you. The medicines don’t work. At least, not fast enough. It’s a miserable lot, whether it’s a lost day or a last day, or the long lisping day, 24 hours plus on multiple planes, in waiting rooms, in line, all parts of that interminable journey back to where you started, where it all began. Because when you are sick, really sick, you just want to be home. Home where life is familiar and predictable, where you don’t have to expend extra energy navigating through the mundane world trying to appear normal and put together for the people who seem exactly that. Because being sick colors everything. The traveling sports team is all laughs and gags and tricks played on each other. How can they feel so good? And the pensioners too can smile and share pictures on Facebook. The nerve, being so happy! And don’t get me started on the road warriors with their logo bags and company shirts and business phone calls on a Sunday that everyone needs to hear because they are so important, sitting beside the inseparable young cutie couples whose hands can’t be apart, touching and prodding and playing while the large traveling families with shrieking kids wreak havoc like it is a playground. Oh, the old and the young mixed and mingled, I look at them all with longing in the airport lounges, envious when they line up for French fries and fast food, or drink down delicious cappuccinos, all smiles and all that, as if life is simple and great and Jesus saves, and hallelujah. Because it is not for me. It is all so unattainable, unimaginable, impossible, and remote. Because it requires a Herculean effort for me to even move. In every step I must master a dozen labors. Never mind slaying the Nemean Lion, defeating the Hydra, capturing the Cretan Bull, I have something more mundane to conquer: Simply breathing, one breath flowing into another. I vow, oh I make so many vows if I ever get out of this place, how I’ll live better and be better, how I’ll be kinder and happier because sickness is the pits. And travel does not cure all if you get sick.
I am in the dungeon, deep in a dark basement. Edmund Dantes was right. Your eyes do get used to the dark. But it is so cold here. Never mind sleeping. The goal is trying to find a position to keep warm, and then not move once it is found. But how can you do that when your nose runs, when you have to cough every other minute, when your head continually throbs like it is playing bass in a prog rock band on a concept album with only 4 songs? To be sick is to be condemned and dismissed and damned. I feel less worthy. I feel like I don’t belong to this world. When I do sleep, it is only nightmares, improbable scenarios that play out on repeat, in a loop, and they are inescapable. I can’t think of anything good. I try to imagine something. I try to get lost in one of my books, either the one I am writing or the other one in my head, but it’s like being in a train car and moving from one section to the other as the train speeds along, and every stop is the same as the last, but anyway, you can’t get off. Even if you can, it’s like nothing changes. I am slipping away. The best years of my life are gone. Once I thought I had potential, promise, maybe some talent. Now, I am not so sure. It is hard to say. Nothing I do matters. I am old, old enough to own gold coins, and not crypto. Old enough to remember tape decks and mixed tapes, rotary phones, tv cabinets as big as a chair. I am old and sick, and cold, my trousers are rolled, and I know April is the cruelest month because TS Eliot told me so, but no one knows who he is here, where I am, in this world I don’t understand Tik Tok, You Tube, or Minecraft. I know this will end because it must. I won’t always be here, will I? I must see the light. I don’t want to remain in exile. I don’t want to be sick. Forever.