The Virus and I

It’s one of the bad nights.

The feeling of unease and trouble has expanded beyond my liver and has spread through the capillaries on the inside of my stomach to the ends of my body. My fingers weigh down on the bed on which I lie like lead bullets. The blood flowing through them is infected and rich with the virus. This unnamed virus.
I wonder what it is.

This germ, this multiplying agent that invades my ostensibly impenetrable, but weak as jelly cells. It enters on the most unexpected, or the most expected, days and nights and begins its quick and efficient siege of my body, mind and being.
I am powerless to stop it.

So, I shut the door. Shut out the people. Lie in the sun, or in the moon, and wallow in my own waste. Wallow in my own mind’s filth and enemies till my chest is heaving and my eyes are dry from staring.

Sometimes I think you could make it go away. But you don’t live inside me, you don’t know the dark dangers that lurk in the crevices and corners of my body. In the hollow by my elbow, or the fold behind my knee. Evils and cruel creatures hide there. They wait impatiently for a chance to travel up my blood to my brain where they set fire to all that stands. They dance in voodoo trances with their eyes burning in anarchy.

I roll to my side and realize that this is my only prison. I do not rattle the bars of my isolation, it’s been too many years. My fingers are callused from holding the freezing metal. Now I stare listlessly out and wait for them to elevate till I can walk freely again.

But tonight is a bad night.

I curl on my side and I’m crying again. I’m not sad. I’m not weak. Sometimes, all the colours of thoughts and feeling build up and the inferno inside releases the darkly coloured, stained fumes till there is no room for my organs to breathe. The only way to let out the colours, the fumes, the toxins is through tears.I selfishly release them. One by one, sometimes many at a time.

The bursting is lessening, the hysterics and theatrics have calmed. Now that the fireworks have shot through the sky and polluted the clarity, the smoke lingers but the storm begins to pass.

Sometimes, I wonder how you’d feel if you saw me like this. I expect your eyes would widen till I could see the whites like neon sticks in the night, and your mouth would open just the slightest. And I expect you’d question your love for me. And what you’d known of me.

But I never really know. Maybe you’d do what I secretly want for you to do if one day you were to stumble upon me in my state of self erosion. Maybe you would rush to me and hold me tight till you almost parted my skin and entered my being. And then collectively, we could fight the virus, the antigen, and smash it down till it disintegrated into the depths of my flesh again. I’d want you to smell the way you do, till your scent was the only air in me to clean out the pollutants and the fog.

Still, I never really know.

And until you find me, which I suppose I hope you don’t, I am left alone to struggle with the consequences of the self destruct button.

If you find me, which I hope you don’t, know that I made the virus. And the virus belched out a part of my soul.

And don’t you love all of my soul?

Welcome to my kingdom. We live here in chaotic harmony, the virus and I. Join us, won’t you?