My recovery from The Plague continues at a glacial pace, yet continue it does, and for that I can only be grateful.  The mental fog through which I have walked for more than a week lifts ever so slowly, so carefully, like a bridegroom gently pulling the veil from his beloved’s face and lifting it with care until he rests it over her head with such ease that she is unaware of it except by sight.  So too is the molasses-like malaise finally drawing back from within my head to reveal the once lively synapses that have survived under its sluggish control.  While I cannot yet employ the sharpness my mind’s blade once wielded because it lies beneath this thick skin of illness that only now peels away layer by layer, methodically, gradually, ever so slowly, I can see its incisive edge peering through, beholding the world once forsaken.

The rest of my body likewise enjoys the fragrance of recovery now wisping through its many passageways.  Headaches are minor but constant, tidy little reminders of what has passed before.  Congestion assaults me still, leaving a beaten and battered nose and sinuses in its wake.  It too, however, lessens with time.  The aches and pains are all but gone, the coughing an infrequent guest coming and going at increasing intervals, a welcome respite finally cooling my sore throat with rest.  Parched lips have begun their healing rituals and call for the wet kiss of normalcy.  In time, my friends…  In time.

The height to which I must climb to escape the dark and sickly cave that has so completely encompassed me this past eternal week seems, to me at least, a longer climb than the fall that carried me into its abyssal grasp.  Why must that always be true with illness?  It appears an unfair trade to so easily and quickly descend into the feverish fires of suffering in but a night, having rested upon the pillow in health only to awake in a state not unlike that approaching death.  I gasp my aching breath at the curse of colds.  They amass their forces and assault us in a single evening, dragging us unaware from restful sleep to writhing despair, and equally they leave us in cavernous unwell to find our own way back to the surface, often a long and arduous trek rather disproportionate to the journey which carried us there.  Is it the biological equivalent of gravity, the selfsame force that makes falling from the mountaintop a quick maneuver when compared to climbing to its peak?  I suspect as much.  So I place one foot above the other, one hand above the other, and I pull and push myself toward the surface of wellness even as the last vestiges of The Plague drip from my bones and fall into the darkness beneath me.

The road to recovery is long, one quite unequal to the road to ailment.  But this is my path and I accept it with eager will to see the lands I have visited finally become memories, cast in shadows behind me as I face the brightness it cannot penetrate but that will soon embrace me.  One foot, and then another…