"To finish, does anybody have anything to say about Chaucer? Do you like him; do you not like him?"
"He's a great writer," I said, "this poem has got some real nice imagery."
"Yah, well, he needs to work on his spelling," she said.

Maybe it's the cough medicine. Maybe it's that I've been closed up, sick in the apartment for so many days. The sky is grey - you just want to part it with your hands sometimes. Big, healthy tufts of snow are falling all around. I looked up, for a moment, and tried to judge where it's source was - if I could see the flakes being rolled out by a big old cloud. But you look up, and all you see is a sheet of gray interspersed with dancing white molecules lilting slowly towards the ground. And on the cold concrete are the boots of the people - the people at the station. Who for twenty minutes of their day are forced together by laws of public transit - we stand at a comfortable distance from one another, but I cannot feign disinterest. What is going on inside of that girl's little skull, I wonder? And that man, yes you with the felt hat and the orange boots - where are you off to? What have you done in your fifty-or-so years here on this planet?

Anyhow, on the bus ride home I was enjoying my solitude through and through. The windows were fogged, so it was something like a submarine. Then a man with these terrible eyes - eyes that told of worry and displeasure. A tuft of greyish orange hair curling out of his hat. I moved my bag from the seat next to mine, and he took this as an invitation. He sat down next to me, and I felt a great compulsion to speak to him. "Wouldn't Fante speak with him? Give me something to write about, right?" I didn't say a word, but I also didn't beat myself up about it. I continued dreaming and glancing at the people around me. Most of them pinching and poking at their phones. I promised myself to never buy one of those. Keep the internet at home - outside, well, that's where things happen. And you aught to be around for those things.

Anyhow, it's a beautiful day to be alive - I can feel that this virus has been defeated by my healthy immune system. Today I nearly threw up, I coughed so hard - and when I did, a glob of green ooze flew out of my throat and into the tub. "I have won" I thought. There lays the remains of the virus. I did not turn on the water. I will let it rot on the tub. You terrible, terrible thing.