I am feeling much better, thank you. Last week’s fever really messed up my head, though. As I mentioned in my last post, when I tried to read, or write, the words would rearrange themselves on the page as I was looking at them. It occurs to me to wonder if this is what it was like for Sarah.

You see, Sarah was dyslexic. I read pretty fast, when I’m not febrile, and she used to take it as a personal offense that I could finish a book in the time it would take her to finish a chapter.

Sarah had an extensive collection of floaty pens, so the word Eskesen was pretty common in her vocabulary. When we were first dating, every time she would say Eskesen, I would correct her: no, it’s Eseksen. And when she would say Eseksen, I would correct her: no, it’s Eskesen. It got to the point where even I didn’t know which was right any more. I managed to keep a straight face for almost two months before I couldn’t keep it going any more, and confessed. We laughed, but then she said, “That’s a really mean thing to do to a dyslexic.”

One day she called me from work, giggling. “Hi honey,” she said. “I saw the strangest headline on CNN.com today. It said, CLAM BELLIES UNREST IN THE MIDDLE EAST. And I thought, what could that possibly be about? Is it because shellfish aren’t kosher? Or, what’s-it, halal? Maybe something to do with the oil spill?”

I didn’t know.

“So then I went to a meeting, and when I got back to my desk, it said, CALM BELIES UNREST IN THE MIDDLE EAST. That makes a lot more sense, don’t you think?”

We shared a good chuckle over that. Her sign-off was the same, whenever she looked silly: “Aren’t you lucky? You get to keep me.”