• They tell me I have a fever, but they do not know how very wrong, and at the same time, how very right they are.

    I sit here staring at a glowing screen. My whole body feels heavy as if someone attached invisible weights to my limbs while I was sleeping. Everything seems farther away than it should; It’s as if I’m looking at life through a rear view mirror. My joints ache, although the simple letters a, c, h, and e seem quite insufficient to describe my suffering. It’s a sore feeling deep inside my bones that laughs at my futile attempts to banish it into the depths it came from. It feels almost as if I bend the right way or twist the right direction, I may be able to shake it off. In vain I try, time and time again, but to no avail. The vile fiend, this “ache” as the English language has deemed itself worthy to name it, watches me with glee as I struggle against his chains. Each time I gain hope, and each time the monster crushes me anew.
    I have shivers. Happy little trills of inner cold that float around inside me, destroying my inner thermostat, just for the fun of it. I can almost feel them laughing like pleased children as I throw the blankets of my bed around, struggling to find comfort just long enough to slip into the state of unconscious sleep I so desperately covet. The bonds they lay on me are as horrible as my aches, letting me stray dangerously close to sleep only in time to pull me back ruthlessly into the hell they have turned my body into. I’m trapped you see, in the worst place imaginable. This “sickness” as they call it, has no right to invade the flesh and bone tool of my very existence, yet it happily proceeds.
    But yet as I sit here battling a foe I cannot see, something inside me changes. Whether out of pity or love I cannot tell, but my muse has returned to my side. Whispering these “words”, these seeds of story into my ear, she smiles. From my warped perspective I cannot tell if it is a smile of joy or a wicked smile of delight at my suffering. I am too weak to decide if I care.
    So I sit here staring at a glowing screen. Words are flowing at a pressure and speed so great that I have no power to stop it. My eyes begin to burn and my throat begs for water, but I cannot move. I write and I write, with a smile on my face. From my warped perspective of the world, I can no longer tell if I smile at the joy of returning to my art, or if I smile in desperation at my own pitiful existence.

    They tell me I have a fever, but I am too weak to decide if I care.