Carrion Cancer

I need something to hurt me. Something sharp and carnal: a copper-tinged taste on my tongue to tell me I am I and I am still here. I need it the way that someone may need food or water or shelter. It’s the base of my hierarchy, without which all other aspects of me will collapse unsupported. Already I see this happening. My hands fade in ribbons before me; the world constricts. I can see through the walls into the heart of the universe and seeing into the heart of the universe I can see that it’ll take a miracle to bring me back.

I need the holy stigmata—not this slow, ambling pain of illness. Perhaps if I had faith in the first place this sickness would have never been allowed to find room and board in my flesh.

It’s only been a week. I tell myself I'm being dramatic. I’ve always had a flare for something verging on the histrionic, so it would be no surprise to anyone that something so simple as a fever could bring such emotions to a fever-pitch. But calling it drama does nothing to quell the feeling: still, it bubbles, caustic and corrosive and threatening to fashion me into a rust-wrought corpse of something that once resembled a person and a soul. I try to wrest myself free of its influence, but struggling does nothing but leave me out of breath, sinking quicker.

I need something to hurt me, but not like this. Not this longing ache.

I need this all to mean something. If it doesn’t, then I'm just a victim of decay. Tarnished and dilapidated, housing only safety violations where once there was a flourishing of life. I'm a rotting industry, the valves of my heart rusted so that they cannot do their job without breaking a bit in the process.

I’ve started praying recently as a consequence of my illness. Not really to anyone in particular: just a shouting-out at the universe to save me, to send something my way to remind me that there is still a “me” that can be saved. I keep my window open now too. This is partially because my fever leaves me shivering if I don’t, and partially because I hope for the flaming tongues of the Pentecost to descend upon me and inspire. I long for glossolalia, for Marian vision. Make me like Job, so that I may at least believe that there can be some revelation at the heart of this malaise.

I’ve never been good at ending things. I’d rather let them go on and on forever, even as they start to hurt me in their continuation. When I am forced to bring something to its close, it usually follows one of two courses: a slow stumbling toward some unsure conclusion, or an explosion of violence. Neither offer closure, and with the thing spent and gone I'm left with a sort of hollowness in my chest.

I need this thing to end to be able to find any meaning in it. But as already established, I've never learned how to let something go. So I cling to the virus even as it hurts me. I hold it tight in my body with a sort of closeness I could never share with another person. We’re the same, just as rust is the same as the metal it corrodes. Not just symbiosis, but unity, a comingling of forms until both are formless in the other's arms.

I wonder to myself what I may be when, finally, things are given no choice but to end. Will I be able to say I know what it was all for? If I do find a reason, will it be true? Or will I have simply clung to the next thing that’s willing to make itself a part of me?