Something Was Burning?
There is nothing worse than waking up in pain!
It was an unusual morning. I was up before 6 am and, as usual, and I started writing immediately and soon got into the flow and found my metre.
What made it unusual was we had a decent Internet connection. This was rare since the big typhoon they named Odette, which disrupted normal communication, and I wanted to take advantage of it. Usually, I would write solidly in the morning, as this is when I am most productive. Sometimes I would write continuously till midday.
Then as I run out of things to say, I start to write to friends and family via Facebook Messenger. In the evening and after I have spent the afternoon out or playing and eating, I generally watched an hour of television via Netflix. This has been my regular pattern, for some time, or should I say, until the typhoon, that is. Then, with no network signal, television, or radio, I would generally end up going to bed early.
I can’t tell you how much I missed my daily dose of classical music, intellectual debate and TV. They stimulate and feed my thought process and provide me with ideas and motivation. Today, just because we had a strong signal, I tried something different, I wrote while I felt mentally charged, then switched to messenger and drafted a quick note to one of my children, then I watched five minutes of ‘Lost in Space’ on Netflix and kept hitting the 10-second advance, so I got to see so much more story in far less time.
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The mixture of media and creativity inspired me as I started to write again, and my words seemed to flow more easily than ever. I kept this creative rotation up for three hours more until I began to feel tired, in fact, quite exhausted.
Usually, around 9 am, and after three hours of writing without a pause, I take a break in the form of a quick nap. This would last anything from ten minutes to half an hour. Since contracting covid 19 however, I have found that I need to take a few brief naps throughout the day, which mentally revitalises me.
The windows in my room are sliding and split in the middle. They are glazed with reflective glass, which is darkened to lessen the heat and reflect the tropical sunlight. The two pieces of darkened glass, which stand side-by-side, stop the sun from burning me, and become especially dark when one side of the window is left open, and the second pane of glass becomes twice as dark. This is good when the sun shines directly down on me while I’m having a catnap.
As the sun moves, it shines through my open window and onto the bed. So, generally, I stick both windows to the left if I’m planning to sleep to keep the direct sun off me. Then over my computer, I place a towel to stop it from getting too hot. That’s what I usually do, but not today, as there was no need. Although it was still hot, it was also cloudy. I jumped on the bed happy and fell into a deep sleep, a far deeper and longer than usual.
It wasn’t a good sleep. Right from the beginning, I was disturbed, as if something wasn’t right in my life. In the same way that occasionally I have heard people calling me from the depths of my unconsciousness, there was something bothering me now. Although asleep, I was conscious of this, and I was becoming more conscious by the moment.
The feeling of being uncomfortable continued to grow. It was almost as if I was in pain! Then, quite suddenly, it got too much for me. I really was in pain! From unconsciousness to fully awake, took just a moment, my legs were on fire. Stinging like mad, I jumped up with more energy than I realised I had available to me and raced to the toilet to hose my legs down and cool them off.
The sun had inconveniently come out while I was sleeping and really gave my legs a roasting. I won’t get caught like that again. Although my legs were already quite brown and none the worse for the experience. The bottom of my feet, which were never exposed to the full blast of the sun, were not. They weren’t badly burned, but enough to cause me to hobble painfully for a few days.
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