Ever since the pandemic, illnesses have gained a previously unknown endurance, a durability titanium tubing can respect. They linger in a way they didn’t seem to in olden times. Coughs set up shop, lying dormant during the day, lulling us into a sense of improving health, only to re-emerge in the afternoon, just as we might be ready to get changed for that first ride back.
Such broad generalizations are doomed to error, except everyone I know who has been sick in the last six years has some story of a clinging ailment, no malingering malady, but a party guest that refuses to leave, a la Dr. Seuss’s “Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now?”
If only we could write an open letter to an illness, even if couched as an allegory, as Seuss’s missive to Richard Nixon was.
When I was racing, each lost day felt like a rope slipping through my fingers, as if some part of my destiny as a rider was at stake. Inevitably, I got back on the bike too soon, before my lungs agreed with my ADHD-fueled impatience, often landing me back in bed.
That a virus can cling with the ferocity of a toddler to his mother’s leg shifts the paradigm from a few missed rides to whole weeks lost at sea. Afternoons approach, and I notice the light shift and my mind turns toward the dresser stuffed with clean bib shorts, the drawer I can barely shut because for once every single pair of bibs is clean. Afternoons approach and I wait for the telltale cough to emerge. And emerge it does. I tell myself my patience will be rewarded and that first ride will be as sweet as the first kiss when lovers reunite.