The silver lining?
I may not have eaten anything other than a banana and some crackers in the last 48 hours, but on the upside, the stomach flu I got last weekend has left me with a vastly augmented sense of smell. On the subway today, for example, I not only noticed the strong cologne the man next to me was wearing, I also whiffed the unwashed hair of the woman a few seat’s down and knew someone else had a banana stashed in their bag, and on the way up to my apartment I was getting so much scent info from my neighbors’ apartments I actually had to refrain myself from stopping in front of their doors—one person was doing their nails, another was smoking a cigarette, someone else was cooking stir-fry. It was all so interesting! (Also, disgusting, but the stomach flu will do that to just about every smell you could imagine, except for coffee, which is unfortunate since that’s about the last thing you’re supposed to drink.) This is, I suddenly realized, probably a lot like what it’s like to be a dog. And what I take from that is that clearly I should give Mirabelle a whole lot more time to smell whatever she feels like smelling when I give her a walk. It now feels like it would be almost cruel to do otherwise, like pulling me (in normal life, back before this flu meant that reading small print made me nauseous) away from a really, really good book.
