Sickness Is Like This (first installments)

People say that I am what I eat, but what if what I eat is eating me?

Autoimmunity is biological irony, it is an irony that you can feel in your bones and your throat and your eyeballs, it is a bitter taste in the back of your mouth, it is irony crackling like stiff joints.

I'm becoming less alive every single day, I am slowly dying, like everyone.

All chemical reactions are reacting towards equilibrium, and nothing reacts spontaneously unless it gives up heat, unless it sacrifices order, unless it pushes order away from itself, into the universe, unless it randomizes. And so living is dying, life is a perpetual re-and destabilizing towards death, a re-destabilizing over and over again, and God is only knee-deep in our sorrows. stability is death, death is stability. God is only making the best of a bad situation.

Pain is good, but only if it means something. Pain is good if it means healing. But pain is not good if it means destruction, and so my pain is sacred and profane at the same time, there is spiritual warfare going on in my nerve cells, and God is losing. Meaning is losing to senselessness.

I am an utter mystery. I am heat energy, I break free from everyone I interact with and go floating, disperse myself throughout the universe, mystery -izing it. I am not anchored anywhere, I have no strength, no substance, I am a little bit more of nothing every time.

Fuck that, I am everything. Autoimmunity isn't necessarily ironic, it is just too much of a good thing. And so I am really hyperbolic, which is like irony, but lighter, like a balloon. Irony is a paperweight and hyperbole is a balloon, and so maybe I need this irony, should embrace it, to keep me from floating off into the ionosphere.

A curtain of disease has fallen on my soul, but the show wasn't over yet, and from backstage I am screaming at everyone to stay in their seat, to not give up on me.

I learned how not to cry at such a young age that I don't remember not knowing how to do it. It's like walking, or reading. And so, some days, if there are any thoughts in my head at all, they are: walked. Read. Don't cry. Get out of bed, brush your teeth, walk to the kitchen, and be sure not to cry. Walk, and walk, and ignore the aching in your feet, knees, hips, and don't cry. Don't cry.

Other days are like, stop crying, stop crying, stop crying. And I will if you stop hurting, and fat chance. And well, then... what? I don't know.

I want to die, and rot, and fertilize a seed, which grows into a plant, which gets eaten by a primary consumer, and then a secondary, and then a tertiary, all of them making ATP, which is broken down into ADP and releases heat into the big wide world, making it bigger and wider, pushing molecules around on a whim.

Photosynthesis is like making love to an angel, and entropy is like the angel of death. All of this is the heave and ho of ecosystems, it's the eternal turnover, energy into energy into energy, angel into angel into angel.

The universe is forever expanding, and my wrist hurts.

We sort of got it right about head, but we were totally off with heart, as far as organs in the body and features of human nature go. And so where, really, have our hearts gone, where is our love tissue, how do we move our compassion muscle, is it voluntary or involuntary? And how do I keep my feelings from atrophying, if it hurts to move my body.

Gravity pulls harder on me than on other people. The center of the earth is greedily sucking me towards itself, because the devil wants any batter than everybody else. Down there is the satellite for all human sorrow, the weeping and gnashing of teeth and up in space is the vastness and indifference of God. I am caught in the middle in a cosmic tug-of-war, ripping apart at the seams.

I am 24 but my disease is older than the oceans. The tide comes in, and I feel terrible, and the tide goes out, and I feel better, and the tide comes in, and I feel terrible.

Birds are supernatural, because why else do angels have wings?

I am encumbered with existence. I am beleaguered with being me.

Autoimmunity goes like this:
I am my body.
My body is a disease.
Therefore, I am a disease.

There is no me without a disease. And, there is no disease without me. So either I eradicate disease, or I eradicate me. Or I continue letting each define the other, back-and-forth, for who knows how long. I may not live past 60, I may not live past tomorrow, I may not have to live with disease for even another hour. Some things are more likely than others.

You cannot SEE an immune system. The problem with diagnosing me is that it is not really a medical question. The question of "what's wrong with me?" when it runs this deep, is really a question of "how am I existing wrong?", and that is philosophical, religious even.

I have never had such basic, burning, HUMAN needs -- I need hands, I need faces, I need hearts, I need laughter, I need love. It has been a distillation, this whatever-this-is, this evaporating mystery. It trims my heart like it whittles weight from my waist, and I breathe, and I love, and I cry, and I laugh, all without pretense. I try; I try very hard every moment of every day just to exist.

I let my bird out of his cage and onto my hand, and he jumps to my shirt front and then I have this little warm life clinging to my chest. Birds don't have diaphragms, so he is expanding the wall of his entire torso to let air into his lungs, filling himself right down to the sacks in his little pneumatic bones. I am feeling him breathing and trying to imagine how space-time is bending to give way to his form, is allowing his shape, is cradling it there. Trying to imagine how it cradles these forearms, these shoulders, this head. How I am nothing if not a keeper of THIS body, and this bird. This is my little place in the universe. And in this moment, maybe for this moment only, I am okay with that.