1. being sick on your own is NOT cool
Spending a semester or two abroad, you will most
certainly come into a situation like this:
One morning you will wake up
and your throat will kind of hurt. You think about how you sat through that
concert the day before and how the window was constantly open, allowing cold
air to move through your clothes and make you shiver. You did cough a few times,
but did not think about it any longer. Afterwards you walked home through a
mixture of a cold icy breeze and vertical rain. Your feet got soaking wet because you
have not bothered to buy some Bergen-proof shoes yet. And so you went to bed,
to your warm bed, with the window open, because you need some fresh air and you
like how the smell of rain slowly fills your whole room, your whole head, your
dreams.
But the next morning, you wake up and you
realize that something is wrong. At first you don’t realize exactly what it is.
Until you swallow and feel it – a sharp pain where the walls of your throat touch eathother, behind
your tongue. You deny the significance of it, drink some tea, wrap a scarf around your neck. It’s just a cold, it
will disappear soon. Thanks to your wide-sighted mind, you buy 3 yogi tea packages in
the biological shop in the centre. Your intake of ayurvedic ginger-lemon
tea raises into unknown heights, because
it is almost the only thing that you can do to make swallowing less painful.
But so far, you feel fine if it weren’t for that. The next morning, you wake up
and the pain is still there – and with it a strange, dizzy feeling in the
head. There is no way you can concentrate on that presentation you actually have to do, instead you just float through the day, without really being there
mentally. It’s no help that at the same time, the university sends an
information e-mail around, warning students of an imminent mumps epidemic. "I got
a vaccine, right?", you reflect, whilst you wonder whether your throat has grown
any thicker than usual. You go to bed earlier, with a bad feeling and you
are afraid of waking up, because you can feel how this is gonna end.
The next morning you wake up and
immediately know it’s true. You have become ill. You’re sweating like hell,
your nose is blocked and you are so light-sensitive that you are actually happy
that the skies are covered with a think layer of grey clouds all day long. You can summon as
much energy as to get up and make yourself a tea, before you sink into the
sheets again. Sleep.
The bad news is that you don’t have the
energy to make yourself some food. The good news is that you are not actually
hungry and could not stand an avocado-bacon-egg sandwich if you were forced to.
You drift in and out of sleep whilst your “Sleep Well” playlist on your
computer plays for the 4th time. You thank your former self for
buying that much tea at once and the only mental activity you undertake is
reading the positive notes hanging on the other end of the teabags.
Than, sometime in the evening, the
skies already have become dark and the rain is still constantly knocking on
your window, asking to get in, because it's quite crowded out there, you get a bit of an appetite. You remember that there is still
some instant soup in the cupboard. The way to your kitchen, the length of which
you in the past always assumed to be to short, stretches into an almost
unscalable distance. But finally you arrive and and indeed manage to put the pan
with some water and the contents of the bag on the stove.
You risk a short view
into the mirror, but regret it the moment your see your greasy hair hanging on
both sides of a head, which definitely would scare the shit out of any kids
knocking on he door asking for trick or treat. Luckily you live in a student
house and there’s no such thing going on here. You stir the boiling soup
some times. A knock on the door. For god’s sake, that can’t be true.
You calm
down, almost expect a party of friends standing outside, shouting “surpriiiise”
and pack you in a blanket, whilst serving you Zwieback and cleaning your dishes.
You open the door. Outside, two girls, whom you have never seen before in your life. Your are on the verge of throwing some Chocolate at them and slam the door,
but they don’t look like Witches or Zombies and you keep my cool.
“Hey, I am Greta.” “And I am Silje” “We
have this magazine with us, and yes, it says here that God is dead. What do you
think, is god dead?” Don’t throw chocolate at them and slam the door. It's considered rude.
Instead, you explain them that you are sick
and that you are definitely not in the mood of talking. So they go their way. You
eat your soup, the taste of which you don’t really experience, either because
your taste-buds are paralyzed or because the soup simply tastes of nothing.
You climb into bed.
Shortly before you dose off, you wonder
whether you could and should have convinced the two girls to wash your dishes and make you
Zwieback.
.
.
