I hate being sick, I thought, feeling sick between the cold clean sheets on the hotel bed. But at least there’s no-one around. It sucks to be sick in this hotel all by myself, I thought, but it’s a much better than being sick with a bunch of people around. When I’m sick at home, I thought, I close the door, crawl into bed, pull the blanket over my head and wait. I stay in with the door shut until I feel better and then I come out and jump right back into things as if I had never been sick. No-one likes being around a sick person, not even the sick person himself. When I’m around a sick person, my first impulse is to get away. When I’m sick, I’m sure the people unfortunate enough to be around me—a sick person—want to get away too. And in general, they do. The people who can get away, do get away. Why not? What’s to keep them there? You may find yourself sick and surrounded by a whole group of people who want to get away. You may be thinking, being sick is bad but it’s even worse being sick around all these people who really want to get a way. Don’t worry! The people who can get a way will get a way soon enough. They’ll get away lickety-split. There’s always a reason to get away, or if there’s no reason at the moment, one will surely come along. One minute you are surrounded, even smothered, by people who want to get away and the next, you are all by yourself—if you’re lucky. But more often than not, there will be people left over. These are the people who want to get away but can’t. The people who could get away got away; the people who want to get away but can’t are left over. These people can’t get away because they feel they really ought to stay. They want to get away but they’ve mastered that impulse—the impulse to get away—and replaced it with the compulsion to stay. So instead of getting away, what they really want to do, they stay and the more they want to get away, the more they find themselves compelled to stay. The people who are truly repulsed by illness—repulsed to the degree that this repulsion could almost be considered an illness itself, a morbid repulsion—nine times out of ten are the very same people who, confronted with an illness, will go way out of their way to stay. You can’t get rid of them, and you know the whole time they are sitting there, locked in place beside your bed, their dearest wish is to get away, far away, as far away as possible from this illness that repulses them. These people can’t get away. These people are trapped. These people—the people who want to get away but can’t—are utterly dependent on you, the sick person, to let them off the hook. They sit by your bedside with every mental fiber drawn toward the hope of some conclusion and, at some point, it just won’t matter which. They might hope one moment that you get better and the next that you die or conversely hope you die one moment and that you get better the next or possibly hope for both at the same time--that you get better and die simultaneously. But if things go on long enough, these people will be wishing singularly and fervently for your death. At that point, your death is better, for them, than your getting better because death is more decisive. Anyone can get better and then the very next moment get worse again. Getting better is a kind of tease. No-one gets better permanently. Getting better is a kind of lull in the progress of getting worse. It’s a lull and, in that way, a prolongation. It’s a prolongation of an intolerable situation. At that point, these people want you to die because at that point, your death is their only way out. Your death has become their release, I thought, feeling like I might be sick, looking up at the ceiling between the cold clean sheets of the hotel bed.
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