The Long Night’s Battle For Humanity’s Soul

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

When I was a child, I had a fever that ebbed and swelled for days. I remember — or remember being told — that my fever was so high at one point that my mother called the doctor, and he told her to put me in a bathtub filled with cold water and ice. I was delirious through much of it and yet I still have impressions of those times.

I remember a night of suffering in which I could neither sleep nor could I rouse myself to do anything other than watch time creep like a dying insect. I watched the sun give way to night one tedious ray at a time in this state, and when an eternity in darkness had been endured, I watched the sun rise in the same slow manner. Each car that drove by, each dog that barked, were the only signs that showed me time was moving at all. And though I witnessed the seismic shifts of light to dark, dark to light, no change occurred in my condition. Days passed in similar fashion, faint impressions of feeling better soon abandoning me to my sickness and fever.

Then came a night when I managed to slip into sleep. And when at last I awoke, I awoke with the understanding that the fever had broken. I was tired, I was weak, but the sickness had retreated. I dared not believe it had been vanquished, having had prior hopes dashed, but I had at least been given a respite.