The tender leaves of my cerebral cortex are peeling away one at a time, the great monkey that is bedridden boredom, stripping my brain like a multi-layered banana.
A free day, you'd think I'd be spending it wisely, so many things clamouring To Get Done, the dishes, the laundry (all this sporty activity stuff has left me with twice the sweat-stained clothes to wash), to write a book, to write a brilliant snatch of code to trap the -SC option from an ssh command so that it requests the private key for said user from said card...
I haven't played EQ in a week, I am rapidly falling behind my brothers in level, skills, let alone usefulness... But there are two oversized tonsil-shaped hockey pucks lodged in my throat that are making it very difficult for oxygenated thought.
Anyone want three quarters of a Copoli burger? It reheats rather well, I would think...
So maybe playing hockey yesterday wasn't he most brilliant ploy a monstre has ever undertaken, but I scored three goals and I'm getting rather less bad at stealing the puck from unsuspecting and precariously balanced frenchmen. In a few weeks, maybe, I'll be able to play on the other side of the ice with the french canadians.
Maybe.
Settling back into my desk afterwards, tho, when the shivers overtook me and David looked at my cheeks alit with some unholy fire and said "so the monstre is human after all" I felt the weakness of the failings of a human body.
I've been pushing so hard lately, watching my muscles firm up, watching lines of code string together (untested as of yet), feeling the rush of the morning sans coffee, down to a cup a day along with three gallons of water, I felt what they meant when they talked of "health"...
I was so sure that I was becoming invincible, when David would cough late at night and I would wrap myself about him to comfort his shivering, I never thought...
I always figured... A body ten years older than mine, y'know...
And yet he never even took a day off, lived with the cough for four weeks before succumbing to a doctor's visit and antibiotics.
One day of wheezing breath for me and I'm hopped up on goofballs, my throat coated with the obnoxious white paste of strong and poorly flavoured pills.
"So the monstre is human after all"
I've been trying to hide that fact so desperately, not thinking like one, not succumbing to the petty annoyances of middle management... Never letting drop the whirlwind that I use as my shield and inspiration simultaneously.
"I didn't know you could knit, even real girls don't do that"
"that's why I can" followed up by a more vicious smirk than was called for.
"You can cook without recipes? You can teach children how to swim? You remember something other than the Fourth Led Zeppelin Album? You sure are weird..."
I secretly love the way he looks at my latest nasty outfit for heading out to seedy goth clubs that nobody he has ever known have ever seen, and then raises his soft oh-so-canadian eyebrows in surprise at his latest discovery of Things A Monstre Can Do...
"I'm a monstre, I toldja." followed up, of course, by another healthy dose of superiority to common seventeen-magazine-obsessed-mortals grin.
"So the monstre is human after all"
I'm leaving for a ski hill in fourteen hours, I plan to be in top cheerleading form by then.
Right now, though, the thought of crawling back into the clinging and needy flannel of my bed is so far from anything I've wanted...
But I'm gonna do it anyway.
Then I'm going to try to get up and shower and go out to see a play in a real theatre with David, like we'd planned. A date, almost, really...
Thinking about it, a few minutes later, I am still yearning to learn how to write.