please pinch me, hard

The sky has no colour, no life, just a melancholy and listless gray which permeates all that lives beneath it. Survival is possible, but I don’t think radiant joy is. 

Bit by bit, it peeps through, that soul and earth warming star, the sun, and makes every living thing sparkle. The sun stipples the trees, it warms my back, and it makes all living things want to live more. Golden and beautiful.

That is how these past months have felt, like glorious warm sun kissing my skin and hair, after an eternity of weary, depressing gray. 

I am a lamb frolicking in spring, with fresh vigour. I have taken wobbly steps out of a dim-lit hovel in which I’ve been trapped, trying to survive; into fresh air. I am a bird soaring in the skies. I am intoxicated with the blessing of health. Always in my mind is the gray sky, the dungeon, but revelling in freedom is so much sweeter for the suffering which came before. 

The absence of continual pain is shocking. Why don’t I have a headache right now? Why do I not need to rest after seeing those people? Why have I still got energy, after such a busy week? How come I haven’t collapsed in bed feeling ill, dead? Why haven’t I needed those drugs and a trip to the pharmacy this week? I begin to measure my good health in weeks, and months, rather than hours. It used to be, “I had a well hour this morning...” now it’s “well I’ve kind of had a well month”. That’s kind of 720 hours. Not all of them well of course, but overall. 

Am I sane? Please pinch me hard, because I don’t want to wake up and find it was a dream. Alive. Not half dead, as I am accustomed to surviving.

“I feel like me again, the real me”, I keep repeating to my ever patient husband. He is excited, amazed, and curious, because he has never met the old me. I think he likes it. A lot. It's kind of like Snow White waking up, and she can finally kiss her prince back.

When did I last sob for my despair at the awful endless illness – for doctors who couldn’t help, for years ticking by? Rather than crying to God for healing, I pour out my thankfulness.’ Thankyou’ never ever does it justice, but I know he knows that overwhelmed feeling I have in my heart. He doesn’t need me to articulate that feeling.

I feel excited that in two weeks I will turn 22. Somehow celebrating a life of health excites me a lot more than recognising another year of survival, of patient (or not so patient) endurance.

I just realised, I’m not enduring life at the moment – I’m actually living it. 

And if I do relapse? At least I will know this is possible, this is an actual reality for my body. But I don’t dwell on that thought; I’m living here and now in these sunny days without blighting them with fears of the night.