Sick

You’re shaky. You’re twitchy. At some points you’re burning up and sweat pours out of you like a freak storm. At others, you’re cold and parched, dry as the desert. And when you’re not at one extreme or the other, you exist as strange, uncomfortable mix of the two.

There’s no doubt about it: you’re fucking sick.

Was it something you ate? Something you came in contact with? Maybe there were existing germs in your body that mutated and hit your immune system with something it wasn’t prepared for; like how the flu evolves to combat medicine.

Whatever the case, there’s now a serious culture of germs growing in you, crawling on every inch of your skin, and polluting your once healthy body.

They’ll try their damnedest to kill you: releasing toxic enzymes, stealing your body’s nutrients, waging war on every fiber of your being.

But you’ll pull through. You always do. You’ve been sick before, but your immune system is rock solid and has always obliterated any threats to your health. You’ll have to deal with the fever, sure. But it will heat your body up, make it inhospitable for this god damn virus.

You grin to yourself, thinking about the hypothetical choice your body has given this infestation: Stop attacking, or leave, or die. In any case, you win and they lose. If only these germs could grasp how puny and insignificant they really are; how could they not realize your body would fight back and that, inevitably, would win?

With that thought, you are willing to wait years, decades, hundreds of laps around the sun if you must, content in the knowledge that no plague can destroy you.

Your fever increases. It’s getting hotter.

You begin perspiring. The seas are rising.

And then. Nothing. No more itching. No more queasiness. The germs are eradicated; a result of their own actions, nonetheless.

You relax back into your natural orbit, beauty and well-being restored. You are eternal, indomitable. As you stare out into the far-off reaches of space in every direction, you wonder if they were ever so naive as to call your body their home.

Ha. A planet being the property of its inhabitants. What a ridiculous notion.