Writhe, Moan

We are so terribly ill. Our ailment is enervating, though we are astir. It leaves us completely constricted, but perpetually frenzied and almost always restless. We do everything and go nowhere, do nothing and go everywhere.

The tissue of our bodies tenses up and loosens exactly as expected. A refined symptom, to be sure. Though, eventually, we are too ill to even recognize it most mornings as the ties get straightened and the blouses buttoned. We move from field to field, leaving flesh, fiber, and spit inside each stockade. We leave our marks; the compartments leave theirs.

Time and momentum become one and the same with our affliction. Our propelled movement delimits how time can sprout up on the surface of our days, coughed up like a sour phlegm. It is possessed and harnessed by our motion, our utterly stagnant motion. A remarkable extraction of our non-action. The clock melts into the flashing light. Our muscles contract, though we never writhe.

Opaque incomplete images manifest with frequency, we are always captured by them – we admit it. We are intensely invested. And though they mean nothing conclusive to us, we meet them as though they are crystalized realities of our world’s doing, or, worse, of our own.

You are here with us. You suffer, too. Though a certain number of you choose this malady. Your lamentations do not register with us. Your neuroses are of a different pathological genus. We make no attempt to provide a justification to you.

We choose a different fever, not this illness. A different kind of ailment, distinct from this stomach-churning malaise. We hope that this, too, has an element of contagion. Though we have no expectations.