Hello, dreamers. It’s been interesting returning to Pathfinder, but I’m starting to feel good about this story. I’ve made some progress. Not much, but incremental progress is progress nonetheless.

What you see above is as far as I got on last week’s WIP Wednesday. Even as I wrote that last sentence, I could tell something was wrong. My cough had been worsening for about a day, but now I started feeling achy, tired. It all happened so fast: one minute I was carefree, plugging away at my keyboard, the next I was curled up in bed, hoping a brief nap would set me right. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what happened.

I got sick. Really sick. The following day I could barely lift my head, much less walk. I had to crawl to the bathroom. I ate basically nothing, not because my stomach was upset but simply because I didn’t feel remotely hungry. I spent the day mostly in bed, shivering, disoriented, delirious. I hallucinated. I lost track of time, as I could barely concentrate long enough to look at my phone.

The next day I felt better…at first. Usually I don’t stay down with any illness longer than a day or two, so initially I went about my daily routine, which turned out to be a mistake. As it happened, the fever, weakness, and delirium went on, at least intermittently, for days, finally breaking entirely just yesterday.

And so, here I am. I still have a nasty, lingering cough, still feel somewhat weak. I’m pretty sure I actually lost noticeable weight during my ordeal, and my efforts to replace at least enough of it to not feel cold all the time have been frustrated by severely diminished appetite that’s only begun to recover. Today, in hopes of making some progress I treated myself to one of my favorite lunches: a bowl of coconut milk pudding with fresh fruit (including bananas), granola and blackberry puree, served with two slices of whole grain toast with almond butter. I had to fight my way through the second half of the bowl. I couldn’t finish the toast, and it might be a while before I want any of that again.

It goes without saying I’ve little to report on Pathfinder, or most anything else to do with my writing. To my credit, I’d say this is the first time since raising my profile on social media that I’ve gone totally dark for any notable period of time, and felt my readers deserved an explanation. But I don’t believe in wasted words. I always feel the need to have a point, a meaning. So, let’s try this:

As I lay in bed, disoriented, having difficulty telling dreams from reality, time became almost meaningless. At times it felt as though I would lay there, writhing in pain, forever. At times, it felt I had. What lucid thoughts I had ran to comforting imagery: people, the men and women who make my life worth living. My closest friends, the woman I love, my sister in Florida, my parents worrying at home in Pennsylvania. Those faces and voices kept flashing by, crafting the net that prevented my fall.

In the end, I was okay. It took a lot longer than I’d expected, and I was certainly grateful to part company with my bed (I slept on the couch last night). But perhaps, sometimes, we need incidents like these. Perhaps it would be dramatic to call this a “brush with death”, so let’s call it a…disruption. Now and then, we need a reminder that, despite our seeming safety and comfort, despite our wondrous modern technology and all our bells and whistles, our existence on this planet remains finite, and fragile.

And so, I send my readers forth into the second half of the week with sage advice from one of my favorite fictional characters, reinforced by my recent experiences:

Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.

Jean Luc Picard