Katherine Meikle

Incurable. They told me I probably wouldn’t get better.

“Probably? That means there’s a chance?” My mother: the patron saint of optimism.

 I’m not a bad person, maybe a sick person. If you didn’t know better you couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with me. My illness makes me hurt within. I suppose it’s a good thing. People get all twisted up about looking ill.

Erosion. I envision my joints grinding down to impotent stubs. Thin tendons, tight and splitting under the skin, like the fraying ropes of skeletal rigging. Below decks. Out of sight.

Sometimes I believe I like pain. Not the physical kind. It’s this other private affliction I can heave up anytime like a hit of opium. I feel it in my body, intravenous, like the injections that once terrified me. It’s comforting, familiar, a pressure put around a wound.

Incurable: an insatiable craving for something I don’t even want, a constant striving to fulfill a different need with a different thing.

I’m falling for someone harder than I would like. A salty English boy who feeds me illicit words like candy floss melting on my tongue. Wrapped up in his shirt, telling him my secrets. I met him two weeks ago and we’re already making plans. I hear his voice and I want to run away or fall to pieces or do something drastic. He makes me the person I never gave myself permission to be.

A phantom limb: pretending to lead a life I never had. I want to undo the knots of the past; the knots in my muscles sink too deep to rub away.

When I was younger, before I knew I was defective, I used to think I was weak. Everyone feels like this, I thought, I just need to try harder. Gym class was a Sisyphean loop of laps, hurtles, and dodgeball, in which I would attempt to prove my metal. The barbed wire around my kneecaps was my own hidden blight. I could manage it. The real scrap was trying to look normal while I carried it.

Wrestling with my new beaux, I watch myself give him all I am. I let myself unravel in his arms hoping he’ll knit me back together again the way I’m meant to be. I’m behaving like a child and someone beyond myself all at once, trying to trust that I know what I’m doing.

Incurable: an unrelenting drive towards an unknowable end. If I keep keeping up, keep flossing, keep dating, keep eating at designated meal times, keep pretending I’m not the hot mess I’ve always been. Then what? Then I’ll be cured? I drink too much. I eat too much. I wander into places I’m not welcome. I don’t feel any better. And I keep asking for more.

What is the illness? The illness is laying in bed with my eyes open knowing that I couldn’t make him feel like a man because I’m about as flexible as a golf ball.

What is the disease? The disease is walking home in negative fifteen degrees with my coat unfastened because the cold distracts me. It’s wondering how deep I can press my nails into my palm before the white skin turns red. It’s leaning in to that hollow place at the pit of my stomach instead of trying to pull away.

Incurable: an acquired taste for pain.

Incurable: the delusion that there’s nothing wrong with that.