Is this what ageing feels like?

I spent last week with a viral infection and a 104-degree fever. My muscles, during most of the delirium, felt like they were being wrung out by a particularly burly local phelwan and strung like an Odyssean bow in a bloody, sinuous, mucosal feat of athleticism. It was pretty brutal. What pain does, among other things, is to collapse relative sensation and relative time, making the present moment feel like it will stretch out into infinity—it abolishes a sense of proportion, of the relative importance of this moment in the expanse of your life. Strangely, it can do so without feeling at all malicious.

The day after the fever broke, and my body erupted in post-viral rashes:

’the lord has decided to humble me comprehensively’
‘honestly it’s biblical af’
‘my gums have also been inflamed during the fever’
’lucky you don’t have a first born child’

It’s been nearly a week since then, and I’m still recovering. I did not anticipate that. I was looking forward to feeling lucky, as I was lucky—I had the care and attention of friends, who compensated for my general incapacity during my illness with great displays of capacity.

But I harbor resentment still, a sense of having been wronged by my body’s incomplete recovery. I thought this would be business as usual. The ghost of Cardinal Wolsey cautions Cromwell, in Wolf Hall, to take Henry as he is, ‘a pleasure-loving-prince’. Over the years, I have given my body similar warnings. ‘You will find this difficult, but you must face facts,’ I have said. ‘You are the body of a pleasure-loving man, prone to his whims and fancies: harden yourself, learn to act accordingly, learn to be a little deaf, blind, dumb.’

And now the body has revolted, reasserted the primacy of the corporeal over the ethereal. The thought of a cigarette repulsed me during my feverish haze. But I didn’t anticipate this revulsion would continue past my exorcism of the virus. There will be no more mucking about, the body seems to be saying. Don’t fuck with me, it seems to be seething. ‘You think you are pleasure-loving?’ my body sneers like a barnacled genie, and transports me into the anhedonic sensation of lying on a bed of dehydrated moss, smashing flint against iron pyrite, in a Sisyphean standoff with damp kindling. My soul feels antiseptic, like a hospital floor wiped with phenyl. If I had a scan right now, I’d half expect to see a false thermocol ceiling above my sinuses, with exposed wire, and harsh fluorescent white lights.

My body is lawyering up, laser-focused on communicating to me the problem of its continued existence: ‘I can make this divorce very painful, very litigious’ it says evenly, before pausing, pushing back its horn-rimmed glasses, looking down at me through my hooded eyes, ‘or we can make a deal.’