Home

"Please do not flush excessive amounts of toilet paper down the toilet. This is a low flush toilet, and it will clog easily."

That's you. Sitting in a tiny gray metal stall in the employee's restroom. You've read that sign a thousand times. Every day you walk into the stall, you read the sign -- a Pavlovian reaction to words put in front of you.

Today, you read it twice. You stare at the gap of white between the two sentences. You are too tired to stand up and go back out to your desk.

You listen to the fan overhead buzzing one constant note that echoes off the brown tile floor. The longer you listen, the louder it gets and the wider the white space grows between those two instructive sentences.

You're sick.

It started yesterday with a sore throat and a headache. Today, it's a runny nose and a dull ache under your eyes.

You hear that it's going around. You hear that it lasts a week.

You count the days left like a prisoner trapped in your own malfunctioning body, making tiny chalk lines.

For now, you are in the stall, gathering the energy to stand up. Your routine at work is to go to the break room and pour yourself a cup of coffee. So you do.

You stir a blob of powder creamer into the brown liquid. It clumps, and little rocks of cream bob to the surface. You stir them back down and take a sip.

For the next week, everything you drink or eat will taste like paper towels. You will feel it going into your mouth. You will feel yourself chewing it, swallowing it, but it will taste like nothing.

Without the sense of smell, by virtue of nasal backup, you will be numb to the pleasure of most activities for six, five, four, three, two more days.

On day No. 3 you have grown accustomed to one clogged nostril. You can ignore the headache. You can smile, despite the strange feeling that all your teeth are about to fall out.

Until today, this entire experience has happened above the neck, but this morning you woke up with an aching back and shoulders.

The skin around your nose is red and flaking from hours pressed inside a Kleenex. It hurts to blow, but you have no choice.

It's Friday night, 7 p.m., and you venture out to a party.

It's hard to make small talk. Your voice has changed, distant behind a wall of congestion. No one wants to get near you. They don't want what you have.

Fortunately, the last thing you want to do is socialize. You grab a carrot from the food table, wrap your coat around your arm and sneak out the door after only five minutes at the party.

You spend the rest of the weekend watching movies from the couch and playing cribbage. You lose.

On Saturday night, you go out to dinner. You order a glass of wine and a plate of pasta. You're hungry, but the wine tastes like dental rinse after a teeth cleaning. The pasta tastes like rubber bands.

Instead of dessert, you take a cold pill. It puts you into a strange, drugged sleep. It pours through your veins and pins you to the bed, like a worm pinned to a tarpaper tray.

Sunday morning.

You're sick of being sick. But the cold is almost over. It feels like the last minutes of pulling a turtleneck over your head -- one last panicked moment as the tight knit of the sweater neck grabs at your nose and eyes.

Then you can breathe again.