Ode to an unknown illness
What words, when the body is under siege? What relief, when the monster lives inside you, and you can’t find it, can’t name it, can’t pick its poison? When the place you thought it lived, the reeking cave of plucked feathers and cast-off bones, turns out to be empty. When it doesn’t answer to the ways you call to it. When the poison that’s supposed to kill it doesn’t. What life, inside the walls of your small home? What home, inside the battered surface of your body? What body, inside the skin you no longer recognize as your own? What is our own in this world we will all one day leave? What is this world we’ve so destroyed that it’s now destroying us? When I was a child, I rolled around on my grandparents’ lawn and walked inside the house covered in hives I didn’t yet have the sense to feel. When I was a child, my mother dragged me to the ER for asthma attacks more times than she’d care to count. When I was a child, a spider bit me, and I, bathed in biblical lore, called it “my leprosy” for the dark, necrotic look it took on, until finally, my mother took me, yet again, to the doctor. But all of that had an end—a shore to which the waves rolled, then stopped, then let themselves get sucked back into the wide swath of water from where they came. From where does the monster come? The monster comes for women most often, it seems. The monster has a taste for the feminine. The monster dresses in drag in the cave you can’t find, where its taken your makeup, your bras, your good shoes, your jeans, and it wears them because you can’t. And it laughs because you can’t. And it thinks it’s got you pegged, that it will win because you’re losing, but the monster has no imagination, no opposable thumbs. The monster cannot write. The monster cannot have everything.