Life line

Any teacher will tell you this.... the first few weeks back, everyone gets sick. It's all those kids with their sweaty snotty sneezing and breathing and mauling swarming around together; no way not to get sick amidst all those bodily fluids. My level of teaching is not so different, same swarm, different age.  So it's no surprise that I am sitting hunched and huddled in a dark room at midnight wrapped around a steamy mug of hot lemon. The house is so quiet that I can hear all its machinery creaking and wheezing; I am quiet, miserable, achy... a strange twin of the house, creaking and wheezing myself. It's one of those wild moments .... you know, when you're thrown back to all the other moments just like this one, some karmic rabbit hole slide to another universe of the mind... my posture calls me to other such hunched over hot mugs quietude, hot toddies as a kid, a forbidden soothing swallow, more potent than all the vicks  vapour rub in the world, the searing comfort pulling me down into a dreamy sleepiness better even  than sleep, more of them as an adult, with my own unregulated proportions of medicinal ingredients, and later, when the rum and whisky could no longer be counted on to provide anything other than  numbed slumber, the move to less enjoyable concoctions.... but always the heat, the hunch.... I wonder if I ever drank one of those knowing that I would not be getting right back at whatever it was that was waiting for me after I got up.... and there was no doubt that I would be getting up. How did I learn to deny the call of necessary rest.... I wonder... how can that surrender  to the solace of hot lemon not carry me on to day of rest, to taking a break.... it's unthinkable... funny how that memory works, that unthinkable ....
funny how that all came back just sitting here, hunched over the comfort drink,  with its promise of  respite, which is all I can get my head around right now; which is enough...
it is.