one thing about having siblings with children: they have children. and those children — they infect you.
a wee germ on a wee, lispy bit means practically nothing. the wee, lispy bit will still run around as if a fever was a mosquito to be swatted away, the runny nose nothing but a persistent itch.
but once that wee, lispy bit gets near anyone above *cough* thirty years old, that wee germ on that wee, lispy bit explodes into disease.
the kind of disease that riddles your frontal lobe with bright jolts of blinding pain and spreads a flower of fever from the center of your face onto the rest of your body, confining you to bed and pillows, barely able to reach for a glass of water and the medicine you need to numb your head to sleep.
and you lie in bed, trying to catch the breath that’s confined somewhere in your chest and the thoughts that got knotted up somewhere in your brain in just the spot that you don’t use very much anymore, and you cough, and wheeze, and sneeze, and blow your nose, and after all that earnest activity, you’re only just more exhausted than before.
and you watch the seconds on your bedside clock tick upwards amidst a fit of coughing, and some shivers, and you lie back and think…happy new year, indeed.