Symbiosis (or something like it)

Strange things will happen to you when you've got what you think is probably a high fever: you start feeling all your organs, for starters, and you become able, in a way you didn't think possible, to individuate and delineate each and every one. These are my lungs; these are my kidneys; here is my liver - I thought it might be bigger ... You sleep a lot, and sweat through the little clothing you're wearing until your bed - or your couch, or the pile of clothes you fell onto on the floor - are soaked through and through. You wake up at 8pm after another 2-hour nap wondering which of the imaginary reconstructions of your body - external and internal - you just dreamed of was the most realistic, and which could make a bigger contribution to society. No jokes. You don't ask yourself how your hallucinatory visions can contribute in any way to society, or why you even care that they might. You spend two more hours drifting in and out of sleep debating this point with yourself, reviewing all the models of your body you've come up with: this one was nice, but who can learn anything from it? This one was too stylised ... this one was purely functional and with no room for artistic licence afforded in its creation, who would even want to look at it?

Each time you wake up or try to move (an uphill struggle, really), you look around you and notice that Eska is never far away. When you are sprawled out on the bed in what you can't really understand but definitely feel to be a comfortable position, she is lying on the floor foot-to-foot with the frame; when you finally consolidate yourself into a reasonable space on the bed, she's right there with you, lying beside you; when you move to the red couch in the living room for a change of scenery (and hoping for a different kind of back support), she's sitting underneath your coffee table, or in the crevice between your couches, or right there on the other couch beside you so she can look over you and watch your every move.

And when, just before 11pm, you crawl (because crawling is easier than walking, so says your spine) over to the entrance table to get Eska's retractable leash to let her out to pee, she doesn't wait to be called twice. In fact, she doesn't wait to be called at all: she just saunters over, casually circumvents your shivering heap on the floor, and waits patiently while you fumble weakly with her collar to get her hooked and out the door. She doesn't even pull on the way down the stairs the way she might, usually.

When you spend the next day in equal part refueling (read: eating - you haven't done that since Saturday night) and sleeping (again), she never once whines for a walk or whimpers for play-time. She spends the entire day beside you, and if she leaves the room you're in at all, all it takes for her to come right back is your distant and weary call.

Don't get me wrong: she still has The Fight in her, and why shouldn't she? When, around 4pm, she sees you're finally feeling a little better and have emerged from bed long enough to send a few e-mails, she'll walk into the kitchen true to her old self and leap into the sink for some leftover cabbage and cauliflower soup at the bottom of your lunch bowl; it seems only reasonable behaviour to me. But when you chastise her for it, settle back into bed and ask her to join you there, she does, and she does it with such a sweet look on her face that you think, you know what? Fuck it. I WILL take her out tonight, whether I am feeling better or not - she deserves it.

Of course, you think, I hope I can sufficiently motivate by then to give her a good walk - she's been such an angel in a time when she was my only source of anything. She could have chosen to provide worry and frustration, but settled on solace instead, and that deserves to be repaid in kind. Part of you wants to stay in bed a little longer so you can be in tip-top shape when you take her out, guaranteeing her a rip-roaring good time. But it's almost 5pm. Soon, she'll want her dinner, and you know it won't be that much longer until she does start whining for some long-overdue time outside. You know this walk won't be able to thank her for what she's been for you over the past two days, but you have to start somewhere.

You think, deep down, that she understands you, anyway, and that is no small comfort, either.