I’ve been in bed for days — which, historically, has not been a promising sign for me. My body tends to associate “back to bed” with “things are about to go very wrong” or, rather: “Hell is here, and you’re going to have to buckle-up.” PTSD taught it that. My brief stint in hospital taught it that. Those long months of recovery where the ceiling felt more like a lid hammered shut on life, and one that would never be lifted.

And yet this time, the culprit wasn’t psychological collapse but something far less dramatic: honest-to-God manflu. Snot, coughing fits, a temperature. For once, my body handed me symptoms I could trust — visible evidence instead of dread, instead of night terrors, instead of the what-ifs and whys of a life relived over and over again when you do not want to be reliving it. It was something that for once didn’t require a trauma glossary or a risk assessment or psych evaluation to understand. Instead it was the damp inevitabilty of manflu.

There were small mercies in the evidence around me: the phlegm, the phlegm, the curling, ripped, red-green-yellow Lemsip sachets piling like confetti by the kettle.

Snot, for once, wasn’t because my sinuses were shredded by cocaine.

My chest didn’t rattle because I’d smoked twenty cigarettes the night before.

And my immune system wasn’t a casualty of litres of vodka.

This was simply a cold.

A democratic, boring, biological cold.

But I spent a long time in bed for different reasons. Addiction is one of the most full-on commitments a person can make — a devotional practice of self-erasure. And my whole post-addiction identity is built on the opposite: work, community, writing, reading, publishing, showing up, holding the centre when for so long that centre fell.

So lying in bed again carries an ache. Not fear of relapse but the phantom memory of the life where bed was the only geography I had. A place that blurred the days into each other until they stopped being days at all.

And yet: this time is different. This is not collapse. This is convalescence.

It reminds me of what Issue One taught us… that illness is never just illness; it is metaphor, history, a weather system inside the body. When Claire Snook writes “touch grounds me… a cup, a foot on the floor” in Seizure 1, she names exactly what I feel today: how the smallest, realest objects become proof you’re still here.

Or Di Slaney, in Lay my head on fleeces, longing for the warm bodies of sheep during a seizure because the animal world carries a steadiness we can’t always muster. ‘If I have another seizure, put me with / the sheep. They won’t stand on me’

And in Issue Two, Lydia Unsworth’s transient ischaemic attack when she references “Mr Jelly on stilts” — lets humour lean into terror without breaking it. Or Stef Pixner’s woman “fantastic in a red dress… blazing” before diagnosis dims her glow. These poems understand how illness tilts the room, how the body becomes an unreliable narrator, in fact, but they also understand endurance, the clarity that arrives after the fright.

So here I am, in my grey silk bedding, noticing the same small proofs Aftershock poets also notice: the hum of the radiator, the cat shifting twice before committing to my hip. Ginger on my tongue. Lemsip gold. The benign boredom of being unwell.

Once, this would have undone me. I used to confuse tiredness with danger. Fatigue with relapse. Stillness with a return of the dark.

Recovery has taught me to distinguish them.

A cold is just a cold. A bed is just a bed. Not a disappearance. Not the preamble to catastrophe.

There is a poetry to this kind of illness — the safe kind — and it’s one that Aftershock has been writing across two issues: the body whispering, not screaming. The body inconveniencing you, not endangering you. The body asking for rest, not rescue.

Sometimes recovery isn’t heroic. Sometimes it’s simply this: the radical act of lying down without fear.

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