Recovering from being extremely ill is a strange sensation.

It’s like being felled in a war, and then waking up to find that your body and your home and your affairs have gone into complete disarray without you, and you must rebuild and put everything back into order.

I feel human again for the first time in what feels like weeks, so am cleaning my apartment – throwing away all the discarded food I tried to eat and did not, the bags and wrappers, piling the dirty dishes in the sink, turning the table back into its usual collection of organized clutter, vacuuming, placing water beside my bed and removing all the other paraphernalia of thermometer and drugs and tissue that signal sickness. Clear-headed for the first time in days, and eating again.

It always brings me peace to clean. The area I’m surrounded by, the space I live in, is one of the few – very few and fragile – places I can control in this world, and I cherish that tiny bit of power, the small expression of individuality that comes with keeping order in this place and making it reflect, in everything from how the cereals and oatmeal are arranged to which pictures are on the wall, who I am.