a virus

Three AM and she still cannot sleep. Coughing, sneezing, tossing in the sheets I nest around her she looks up at the ceiling into the darkness. I bring a fresh glass of water and get her to drink some. The laptop is there, the millionth animated film flickering away, soundtrack bubbling along but she is not interested. At one point I am too tired to do more than hold her hand and whisper to her to breathe through her mouth and try to go back to sleep. She blows her nose constantly, enough that it makes me nervous.

When she does find sleep, I slump into the chair in her room. I have a sudden fear she will stop breathing. I know this compulsion, this drastic imagination that creeps up on me in the middle of the night. It was different when I was younger. I used to be scared of phone calls, always imagining it was the news of someone's death. I could not imagine it was a wrong number, or someone trying to get me to vote, or to buy some new pots and pans. It was always that death impulse, and then the methodical, quick erasing of that idea. 

Outside the windows the street is warm. People are walking around in t-shirts. I am making more soup, a minestrone this time. It needs basil and spinach but I am not going to the store today. It is cooked from what is in the fridge and I am sure it will give us heartburn. E is wandering around the rooms, coughing, bored out of her mind. I brush past the guitars standing in the hallway, catching a string as I bring her a bowl. The lone note twangs in the afternoon. I have not played music for almost two weeks now. Each day is just a march through headaches and medicines, fifteen minute pauses to take temperatures, the warming of leftovers, the short naps in the afternoon. 

I wake from them, smelling car exhaust from the street and diesel from the train tracks. There is a terrible taste in the back of my throat. I make a coffee for myself and then see that E is sleeping in her little bed. I hear the air chugging in and out of her.