more sicknesses

Existence is like crushing a snail underfoot -- that same kind of deathly cringe.

Inhuman really just means unfeeling, and so human is anything that desires, and suffers for it, and so animals are human, plants are human, fungi are human, protests are human. A baby learning how to walk, a fledgling stretching out its wings, a sapling reaching to the sky with its branches—these are all the same kind of gesture. A virus sticking its spindly legs into a cell's membrane is the smallest of these acts of will, the smallest example of what it is to long for something, and to externalize that longing, to project it outside of yourself. If it hurts us, it really doesn't mean to. But it must do what it must do. It must survive, for the sake of surviving, and so it injects survival into our cells, survival into survival, to mutate survival into more and more survival. A mutant is hyper-survived, is too much survival. A rock is inhuman, but a monster rages with desire, and suffers with tenderness.

I am a mutant, and a monster. I am a sick person.

I am knit from my mother’s insides. When I was born I was pink and had less places where my flesh funneled into itself and then back out again; torso poured straight into thigh into calf muscle, it was less obvious where tendons became entangled with bone. But now that I am grown, and have grown longer in limbs, have extended my extremities to touch things that I shouldn't, now there are places on my body that are gaunt like old women's faces, there are places where soft tissue scrapes and pops over bone like the clicking of knitting needles wound up in yarn. I bend and I stretch and I squat and I swivel, and I tug and I tug and I tug at these places, the way you can tug and tug at a memory, the way you can tease a tangle out of yarn. With places like this, and memories, I'm grasping at anything that is other than myself, anything that will push back when I pull. I am stiff, I am aching. I am aching with longing, I am longing with aching, I am longing, longing, longing, with aching, to be without aching, to be without, to be.