The eating

I am sick.  I am a sick woman.  I use my sickness as an excuse, even as I hate it.  It tortures me.  It beats me like husbands beat their wives.  And yet, like those wives, I keep coming back to it.

This sickness, I want to kill it.  I want to commit murder against it.  Put me on trial against it and I will tell you why it deserves to die.  It is a wife-beater.  It is a mother who pimps out her baby for drug money.  It is the father who rapes his own child.  The old man who calls you a bitch and spits everytime he sees your face, who heaves and shits in his pants, who can't breathe for himself because his lungs have withered and dried from years of smoking but who just won't die.  It's like that.

Well, maybe not exactly like that.  Maybe it's more like the flying bugs in the back corner of your coffee shop.  The ones that crawls on the window and flies into your hair, making you want to scratch all over not just your head.  It's also like the cockroaches you grow up with, the ones that keep coming back bigger and more numerous even though you try again and again to spray them and feed them all kinds of poisons.  Oh, some of them die, but some of them don't, and they learn to live with the poison.  If I was a cockroach, I would want to be one of those that die, because who wants to live eating poison?  But sometimes, I also wonder about those that don't.  What is it like, to be one among those that can outlive the likes of me and all our poisons?

Sometimes I don't know if this sickness is something outside of me, an alien existence that has somehow inhabited my being, or if it's not actually myself.  Maybe I am the cause.  Maybe I am the sickness.  But that's my problem, that not knowing where it comes from.  Or maybe I do but just can't face it.

In any case, something still needs to be done.  An exorcism, maybe.  A purge.  Or total ingestion.  Yes, perhaps I can eat it.

I will need fingers to write, to tell you about this eating.  So I will begin with the toes.