At my appointment with the first doctor who might finally name the nebulous illness I’ve
suffered with for seven years, the intake form requests I list my symptoms; a hazard of my
profession that every ache manifests in metaphor. I want to fill the page:

Snake-pit gut, nerves a swarm of needling wasps, joints riddled with buckshot, limbs like a slack-
stringed marionette, brain a tinned peach swimming in syrup. Allergic to bitter greens and
chocolate, onions and garlic—mango sizzles on my tongue like low voltage wire—hot showers
and deep thought, long phone calls and sunblock—the sun, itself, once raised welts on the
cadaverous skin of my neck.

Once I imagined I could harness the power of language to weave the symptoms of my raveling
health into a tapestry more illuminating than inconclusive tests and scans. If I could transmute
information to an answer, it might give me power, like naming god or Rumplestiltskin—a word
to rail against or invoke like a curse.

But the names I’m given—Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome,
Orthostatic Cerebral Hypoperfusion Syndrome—though they please my lust for language, are
little more than codes for my insurance, which covers nothing. And the remedies? Fruitless.
Twenty pills a day, and still the wasps swarm on.

I’ve begun to resent the powders and capsules, the proposed charts and pain scales I’m meant to
keep but haven’t, loath to feed this leech the few moments it hasn’t yet siphoned. I feel I might as well return to the Victorian era when some hapless doctor would have shrugged his suited shoulders and pronounced me with the vapors, or informed me that my uterus was wandering the cobble-rutted streets of my body, wreaking havoc like a Dickensian imp.

I must admit, a fainting couch sounds lovely, perhaps a season by the sea where I might drift into
an illness as fathomless as the ocean, bathe in the silver spill of stars aligned to misfortune and
take that as the cause—something cosmic, more romantic than the body’s two-bit fabric fraying
at the seams.

In the throes of languishing, I grow bitter, desperate. It would be easier to express envy—that I
want to be anyone not cowed by pain. But sometimes I’m so disgusted by my own humanness—
ache and sweat and spent sinew, mind like a stopped drain swirling and swirling but never
rinsing clean—I want to be other.

I want to be fungi looming low and quiet, spinning the spoilage of a former life into indigo milk
caps’ blue-gilled beauty, prized flesh of honeycombed morels. Or algae floating thoughtless on
the water’s mirrored sheet, blanketweed reeking blithely to the heavens.

During the pandemic quarantine, those who had once been in prison shared the wisdom that
relenting to monotony made time move faster, begin to lose its structure, the days slipping past
like sand through a cracked hourglass. So I submit to the grind of fatigue and fester, devise the
simplest of routines to repeat ad ifinitum.

I wake under protest, lift weights—though my joints protest, threatening to splinter like tree
limbs riven with dry rot—eat the same, safe foods that won’t arouse the suspicions of a body
grown paranoid, pace laps around the living room for hours on end, soothed by the rhythm—the
steady pulse of blood that powers a brain prone to shutdown—and while I walk, I pen cascades
of passages on my phone and email them to myself.

The only true rule: Do not deviate. Soon I know time only by how the trees bud bright as beryls,
or lose their leaves like mourners shedding locks of hair. Wake, walk, ache, write—bud; wake,
walk, lift, quake—shed.

Having whittled life down to the meanest existence, sanded off the edges, I find it smoother,
more palatable, but lacking substance. Sometimes I buck against this smallness in the most ill-
advised ways, testing my limits in fits of spite: I hike mountains in defiance of the spine’s quiver,
sail Great Lakes, though my sea legs have been swapped for nausea; for months I drink cacao,
though it seethes like lava in the caldera of my stomach. And tonight, tired of the same four
fruits, I grow reckless.

I wake this morning able to answer Prufrock’s question—I have dared to eat a peach. Knife-gut,
jelly-knees, gelid shiver, ice-pick to the frontal lobe—though, at least I have no dentures to
dislodge. Add it to the list of allergens, another edge sanded away, another stone fruit plucked.

A hazard of my profession that every ache manifests in metaphor; what can I do but fill the page,
reweave the body’s fraying fabric with language? I take this small, ugly world—growing smaller,
gnawed down to the pit—and write it larger, lovelier, find its shape in the tectonic plates of my
bones drifting apart like Pangea, let waves of pain build an ocean, let the bright burning of my
neurons form a cosmos. No, the words don’t give me power, but I find purpose in spinning the
spoilage of my life into something I might mistake for beauty.

Photo by Valeriia Miller on Unsplash