when i'm feeling sick, i like to imagine.
that my body is the stage of an epic,
a critically-acclaimed netflix original wherein i am irrelevant to the outcome except in my crests and furrows and forests and plains. there is a beginning and a middle and an end made all the more satisfying by their inevitability. and that's just the flu.

i like to pretend that there's a reason. that there exists a narrative, some deeper statement held in contempt of a stone-faced court, a message that cannot ever be parsed in a language that could explain why i feel this way. or better yet, a comforting draped tapestry that replaces self-awareness with april showers steaming on a fevered forehead.

sometimes i'll think on it as i rest.
hacking up sandpaper diatribes and existing in that terrifying state of circadian purgatory that stretches every dimly-lit hour into a week of retching, violently exoteric solitude. i have a string of fairy lights painstakingly arranged across my wall, and focusing on their pretty bouncing motion drains me of ambition and fear until all that is left is the quiet embrace of constant but minor pain.

occasionally i think too ******* this.
then it's back from the battleground to the main event, a swelling dramedy of good versus evil because never could my ego be satisfied with the illogical attack of an organism that neither discriminates nor appreciates my tirades. there has to be a reason, karma or a deity or the whim of the universe that picked out me to feel so awful. i can't bear being anything except perhaps the protagonist in a cautionary comedy,
as the slapstick laugh track bites back as my joke and i fall flat on our jaded backs
and feel forsaken for the sake of
a fever that'll leave in a week
leaving me weak and

honestly? it's just really sweaty.
i'm baking. it feels like every bone and orifice in my body is aching. but that wouldn't make for the most entertaining diagnosis, now would it?