i. infection and incubation

Finals week on campus is a breeding ground for illness. I, like all of my other classmates, have lowered immunity levels against the germs and viruses spreading around campus. And I never feel it at first. I might go hours, days even, after being infected with the contagion before I feel its consequences. The fever acts silently, sneakily catching me in its grip. I never know what’s coming until it hits me in the face.

I never know the obsession’s coming until it hits me in the face. It starts with simple thoughts, a little burst, a bubble of admiration when I listen to her talk with poise and easy intelligence, or when I see her series of awards. I never know when exactly the seed is planted. Maybe it was that Tuesday when we walked together to an event and chatted on the way there. Maybe it was those few weeks when we sat together at the same table. Or maybe it was formulated in those moments when I allowed myself to dream, to craft an unrealistic image of someone I desperately wanted to know.

ii. onset of symptoms

It’s always at night that I start to feel the fever creeping in. What begins as an innocent headache, or a persistent dry throat becomes a fever that grips my entire body and makes me reluctant to get out of bed. I dread the rush of cold air that sweeps across my body when I force myself to push back my covers, like the unbroken ice that chills the air when I try to make conversation with someone that I don’t quite know yet.

I try, though, and they respond a little. There’s an awkward fog in the air, the uncertainty of whether or not they’re just humoring me and responding to be polite, or if they’re beginning to return the same interest. I tackle conversation topics the way I memorize biomolecule structures for biology class—I keep a running list of topics that I haven’t breached yet, waiting for a chance to get to use them, and every time I do, I feel a jolt of nervousness. Is his smile too polite? Is his answer too distant? Is she responding just to be nice? Does she want to avoid the topic?

The persistent questions, coming back again and again in different forms, scratch at me like a relentless itch, like the tickling of my sore throat that makes me want to drink more and more water until I drown the discomfort. Subconsciously, though, I know that it’s just begun. I am not delirious yet. It is too early for me to trick myself into thinking that they like me just the way I like them, that their distance and refusal to confide is just their own personality, that I haven’t lost all hope yet of developing a relationship with them. It’s only been a month, I tell myself. It’s normal for us not to have too much to talk about.

It will soon get worse.

iii. fever and delirium

When I wake up the next morning, the delirium has already set in. I feel strange yet almost normal. I don’t notice the extra fatigue that seems to wear at my willpower to get up. I don’t realize that I’m running a fever until I glance in the bathroom mirror, and even then, it takes a couple moments to realize that the gray face reflected in the mirror is me, and that it means that I’m sick. I feel like I’m moving through mud, but something about the delirium tricks me into thinking that this is normal, like the way I accept being constantly stood up or being ignored, their changing moods, the enthusiasm and closeness one day just to face the chilliness and distance of being ignored the next day. Something in me has gotten out of balance, and my desperation to interact with the idol and image of this person that I invented in my mind makes increasingly self-demeaning choices seem logical and reasonable, if only it would elicit the smallest of reactions from the other person. Sure, waiting for hours for him to show up is completely fine, putting up with the countless times he stood me up is fine, all because sometimes he does show up, and when he does, I have a frame onto which I can drape my imaginations and fantasies about who I think he is, the person I have grown attached to.

Seeing my gray face in the mirror makes me, ironically enough, want to laugh, even though there’s nothing funny about the situation. I brush my teeth and I stare at the pink spots of color on my cheeks, fascinated. I’m balancing these two different perspectives at one time, one, the perspective of an outsider observing the delirious and slightly outrageous behavior of someone running a fever, and, at the same time, the perspective of that very madman who stares in the mirror at their cheeks, flushed hot, highlighted against the background of an unnaturally pale face. From this outsider perspective, I know that I’m sinking in quicksand, that concessions, excuses made for his absence, all drag me down a delusional path that only gets harder and harder to return from.

As I change from my pajamas into clothes, getting ready for the school day ahead, I feel the bitter cold piercing through my skin and seeping into my bones, cold like the silence that suffused the atmosphere after I asked a question. “What are you guys talking about?” Silence. “When are you getting here?” Silence. After I pull on a thick sweater and begin doing up my hair, my entire body burns. My torso feels stifled in my sweater, and my face is hot, my neck radiating heat, like the sudden warmth I feel when he lets me hang out with him for an entire afternoon, when she talks with me like an equal, the warmth I know will eventually burn when the cold inevitably sets in, but embrace nonetheless, like a reckless moth flying towards a flame.

I sit, numbly staring at my desk, feeling the fever rage through my body. I lose my sense of time. I could have been sitting there for twenty seconds, or an entire hour. Stillness settles through my entire being, and even the thought of lifting my hand, much less pushing myself out of my chair, feels like sloughing through neck-deep water. I have no energy to drag myself downstairs and take the pill that I know will break my fever.

A splitting headache builds, initially just a tickle behind my eyebrows, but soon seizes my entire forehead in its clammy, unforgiving grip. The pain clears my mind, pierces through the delirious fog like the raging torrent of a river, held too long behind a dam, as it tumbles down the hills, destroying and devouring as it goes, slicing a new path through the earth. I, unwillingly, know what I must do.

iv. recovery (it tastes like this)

I dump a pill of Ibuprofen into my palm. One time, in desperation, when I had a twisting stomachache but no water, I chewed a pill to swallow it. It stung as it went down, bitter, curdling my taste buds as its guts spilled open on my tongue, crushed by my teeth. Even though I have water and I can directly swallow the pill without tasting it, the taste seems to return to my tongue. It’s a reminder, a ghost of that creeping realization, knowledge that I’ve always known but willfully ignored, the realization that no matter how much I try, how many conversation starters and questions from previous chats to follow up on I memorize, I can’t make them light up the way I do when I see them. I can’t make them like me the way I like them. If they don’t like me, they just don’t. There’s nothing I can do about it.

I choke slightly as the pill goes down. It battles all of my misplaced convictions about how hard work must lead to success in personal relationships. It challenges the value of all the efforts I had been putting in for the past few months to get just a little closer to them. But as I breathe out, the pill successfully making it to my stomach, I have faith that I will feel better soon.

By the time I’m leaving the house to head to school, my fever has subsided. My head is still marked with the faint grip of a migraine, and my tongue is still stained with that bitter taste that makes me recoil—so long, though, that it remains on my tongue, I will remain awake, clear, lucid, and fever-free.