I've Been Flat On My Back, Staring Up at the Molding Between the Ceiling and the Wall and Watching Both Planes Meld Together Into A Fluid Continuity

and what's more, I've been told it's West Nile Virus.
I thought at first it was some bug I got from I* - whenever I get sick its a day or two on the heels of I* - but all I knew at first, in those early days of delirium, was that once definite forms were liquid and all the more beautiful and reasonable for being so. I alternated between the sofa and my bed - sometimes nodding off on the sofa and waking up on the bed or vice versa, no matter. There was no finite difference between one room and another, and, as I recall, one day and another.
I fell flat on my back sometime Monday afternoon and felt like an egg could be fried on my forehead. That interesting twist to breakfast lasted an hour or two, then I couldn't stop shivering. These temperature extremes alternated until about three this morning, when I woke up retching, stumbled to the bathroom, tried to throw up, couldn't, fell back to sleep and woke up feeling fine. But this is not about disgusting bodily fluids, I assure you, it is about a state of expanded consciousness contained with-in a tropical virus.
God in a mosquito.
I spent the first day of the ordeal bemoaning my fate - oh, woe is me that this hardship should befall me, when I must make a living with honest toil upon the land, but am too weak to grasp my noble hoe - but sometime that evening got caught up in the symphony that originated in the coils behind the refridgerator. The sound swirled around in my head as I lay shivering on the sofa, seemed perfectly synchronized with my heartbeat and the chatter of my teeth. I listened for a few minutes or a few days, I've lost track, but the relative position of the Earth and the sun was relevant to nothing.
I kept simmering on the stove at all times a pot of rice soup liberally doctored with ginger, garlic and onion, and ladled myself a portion when-ever I felt hungry. I juiced a whole bag of apples, one day.
I'm better, now. Must've been the ginger. I'm now back on the world of the rational and the sane, and I assure you, we're all better because of it. I take my health for granted no longer. I don't want to go through another night alternating between chills and fever, to go days with every bone and muscle aching, to stagger around the house in a delirium with all sense of linear thought suspended. I'll wear a sweater when the weather gets chilly, now, and I'll never venture outside the house without my galoshes. I'll brush and floss and wear my seat belt and get five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.
You don't take precautions until you get knocked flat out on your back. Then you take too many. Then gradually you fall back into your original complacency and you get knocked flat on your back again. I wish I could say I was smarter than that, but I'm not. We're going to evacuate the entire Eastern time zone at any threat of a hurricane for a few years now, then gradually pay less and less attention until one day we wake up to discover we're acting like we always did. I feel like I'd like to close on a more cheerful note than that. But that's what I've learned.