My cough is getting better, 3

Once again, I am writing this to put a mark on the calendar. Once again, I hope that writing about the subject won't jinx anything. Once again, I am knocking wood.

For a while now ... maybe a couple of weeks, I'm not really sure ... it has felt like my cough has been on the whole rarer and more sporadic than it was in November and December. Of course the progress hasn't been linear; a sequence of good days could still be punctuated by a bad day. But last week I attended Sangha in person for the first time since I began feeling the tickle in my throat.

Then yesterday it seemed as if my whole head had turned liquid on the inside, and was draining out my nose. I soaked four handkerchiefs and innumerable tissues. I got nothing done all day (actually that's been a problem for a while regardless of my cough) and I went to bed at 8:30. I slept ten hours or more.

And this morning I feel ... different. I won't claim that it's all over. But I've been up for more than half an hour while logging in and typing this, and I've coughed once. A small, almost vestigial cough. Did yesterday drain all the gunk out of my head? I guess we'll see. But maybe.

As of today, it's been eleven weeks and some—not quite twelve weeks—since the day this round of coughing started. Maybe it's winding down. At any rate, I'm hopeful.

       

What was and what might have been

This post is a little different from everything that has come so far—over 1500 of them. This post is deliberately, consciously fiction. But that shouldn't be so strange. I've used this venue to make forays into poetry, philosophy, armchair psychology—even meming, for heaven's sake!—in addition to all my usual whining. Why not fiction?

"Roughly he grabbed her heaving shoulders,
pulling her down onto the bed and ...."

So to be clear, what I have linked in the pages below never really happened. It is purely fiction. More than that, it is actually pornography, or at any rate an attempt at pornography. I don't know if it really works, but that's how it should be graded. If it doesn't work, leave me a comment to let me know why, or what I need to fix.

Having said all that, the story is nonetheless based on an event that really happened. Back in the summer of 1992, Marie undertook a cross-country road trip. She stopped in for one weekend to visit Wife and me. (I mention the visit briefly in this post.) The visit was fun, but its long-term consequences poisoned my friendship with Marie for a while, because Wife told her lies about us that led Marie to offer to be my side-piece. I was already uncomfortable with Wife sleeping around, and I was pretty sure I was in favor of monogamy on principle (even though I also wanted to get into the pants of Girlfriend 1, who wanted nothing to do with me). So I was troubled and confused over the issue, and this meant that I handled Marie's offer very clumsily. She was hurt, and took my rejection very much to heart. When we finally got back together in 2016, we had a lot of damage to work through.

But recently I began to wonder, What if Wife had just told Marie the truth? And then what if, on top of that, she had been a lot more cunning and skillful at human relations in general? Could we have had a different outcome?

The story that follows is one possible answer to that question.